1993 05 08 Melody Maker New Order Feature

Tales of Ordernary Madness

NEW ORDER are an enigma. Fifteen years on from their seminal post-punk beginnings as Warsaw / Joy Division, they are still regarded by many as our finest pop group, seemingly incapable of making a less than great record. Indeed, their latest album, 'Republic', suggests they are currently making the best music of their lives. PAUL LESTER travels to Los Angeles to meet his heroes on and around the set for their infamous 'Baywatch' / 'Top Of The Pops' performance for 'Regret' and, genuinely baffled, asks: how do they do it? Son of a beach: ANDY CATLIN 

WILL THEY EVER SOUND THE SAME AGAIN?

THE FIRST THING BERNARD SUMNER, ETERNALLY BOYISH singer and guitarist with New Order, says as the flame-haired journalist enters LA's Sunset Marquis hotel is, "Hey, it's Mick Hucknall!"

The first thing Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris, respectively New Order's keyboardist and drummer, ask me as I approach their poolside table is, "Want a chip?"

The first thing gruff, bluff New Order bassist Peter Hook grumbles as I pull up a chair for a spot of sunbathing is something along the lines of, "F**off, you twat."

And I stare at the sky and I wonder: will New Order, the planet's leading purveyors of flawless disco existentialism and always, always, my favourite group, ever sound the same again?

WHAT do you expect from New Order?

Digital perfection and pristine woe. A quartet of immaculate conceptions. Furrowed-brow aesthetes crushed by sadness who, even more than The Smiths, have elevated angst and alienation to the status of High Art and yet are capable of scaling the dizzy heights of bliss. Music that satisfies on a physical, emotional and intellectual level. Something superhuman. Greatness, in a word.

And why not? This is a band who formed 15 years ago (Hook, Sumner and Moms formed Stiff Kittens in 1977. Later they transformed into Warsaw and then Joy Division; Gilbert joined New Order in 1981). Yet, a decode and a half on, they have still to make their “Self Portrait" (Bob Dylan) /"Goat's Head Soup" (Rolling Stones) / "Strangeways, Here We Come" (The Smiths)... perm any  patchy, failed experiment from rock's ragged tapestry.

Basically, New Order are a band who have yet to do anything wrong.

What do you expect from New Order?

Transcendence. Nothing less.

But what do you get when you finally do meet New Order? Possibly the four most "normal", least pretentious people in pop.

Will a week in their presence dull the obsession and tarnish the myth?

I'M still asking myself these questions when, by the hotel pool mere minutes after my arrival, Peter Hook starts leafing through a local newspaper and chances upon an advert for, not some posey late night art-flick (New Order have, unaccountably, enjoyed a reputation for being cerebral ever since their days as Joy Division) or chi-chi electro danceteria (the band were into clubs way back when people thought house was something you lived in), but... bowel cleansing.

“Anyone fancy having their colon irrigated?" Hooky asks, wrapping his turquoise kimono over his leopard-skin swimming trunks and re-adjusting the shades an his head as Gillian, Stephen and manager Rob Gretton ponder the dubious pleasures of a jet wash up the jacksy.

Bernard, meanwhile, is reading another paper, engrossed in an editorial about LA's 1992 riots. New Order have, with horribly imperfect timing, come to the city to perform "Regret", their 21st single, live from the "Baywatch" beach in a satellite link-up with "Top Of The Pops", in exactly the same week as the Rodney King hearings. According to the paper, scenes even more cataclysmic than last year's are due to erupt at any moment.

Hooky is typically flippant about the expected tumult.

"How selfish can you get " grins the bassist, "getting shot on the day we do our song?"

Bernard, on the other hand, is keenly aware of the potential irony of the situation - New Order to fiddle as Hollywood burns?

"I don't know about you," sighs the singer, his peach-coloured cocktail repeating on him, "but I think it's in really bad taste us having a party on the beach with all these bimbos while all that's going on. It's like doing a cookery programme from Somalia"

And it's funny so we laugh but I can't help wondering: will New Order ever sound the same again?

TO answer this, I dash off to my room to play "Republic", the band's latest and greatest monument to electronic introspection - I need to remind myself that art doesn't imitate life, it shimmers miles above if. Just as I'm about to leave, however, Peter Hook, self-styled Viking hell-demon from the Planet Shag, invites me to go and look at some Hadey-Davidsons on Sunset Boulevard.

We do a bit of window shopping. Hooky agrees to buy me an Elektra-Glide for my next birthday with the royalties from the new album and I return the favour by buying him a beer in "Barney's Beanerie", a bar that attracts a particularly voluptuous and statuesque sort of clientele. So we pretend to be slavering, rabid heterosexuals for a while, then Hooky notices a Cher lookalike at a nearby table and asks whether I've met any big stars. I casually reel off a few names (Jagger, Kylie, um, Courtney), but really, I tell him, the biggest stars in my personal galaxy are, and always will be, New Order.

At which point the usually leather-clad, legs-akimbo bass supremo from Hades looks down at his beer, quite embarrassed by this fan-like outburst, and tells me, hall smiling, to cut it out.

The rock monster-machine is human!

Armed with this knowledge, how can New Order ever sound the same again?

CLEARLY, New Order are modest as hell and couldn't give f*** about their (f***ing immodest) achievements.

This realisation dawns on me later that night at the hotel when, during a special New Order quiz arranged by yours truly, Gillian, Stephen, Peter and Bernard prove they know approximately one-fiftieth as much as me about their back catalogue, dates of releases, details of B-sides and so forth.

The notion is emphasised when some record producer or other with a fake tan and fluffy bouffant strides over to our corner and, vaguely recognising the four Mancunians, wonders what they're called.

"New Order," Bernard whispers. nursing a White Russian in his lap and sinking back into his chair like an awkward adolescent.  Incredibly, the chap has never heard of New Order and demands to know who else they've worked with.

"WHO ELSE? JESUS CHRIST, MAN, THERE IS NO ONE ELSE! FOR THIS IS NEW ORDER, THE BAND THAT USHERED IN THE POST-MODERN AGE, VIRTUALLY INVENTED ELECTRONIC POP, INFLUENCED EVERY TECHNO ACT ON EARTH, BROUGHT DANCE CULTURE TO MILLIONS AND MADE SOME OF THE BEST RECORDS OF ALL TIME! SO PROSTRATE YOURSELF BEFORE THEM! AND MAKE IT SNAPPY!!"

The above is what I might have said if I was in New Order.

But this is what NewOrder did say: "Um, well, our new album was produced by Stephen Hague, who has done some stuff with the Pet Shop Boys." Affable and unassuming one minute, burping and belching the next. NewOrder are "normal" people, all right.

And the question remains: will their music ever sound as good again?

LOOKING FOR CLUES

BEFORE this matter is addressed, it must be stressed: although you can never spend too much time with New Order, you just can't expect to draw neat lines between the people and their "product" in the process. Because more than any other group in pop, New Order bypass the messy act of creation, their records arriving fully formed, untouched by humid hand. Also, unlike their peers, it's almost impossible to strip New Order down to their component parts. The appeal of, say, The Smiths could largely be understood in terms of Marr's chiming guitar lines and Morrissey's stylised miserabilism. The interplay between Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler chiefly explains the magnetic allure of Suede. And the creative impulse behind Pet Shop Boys arises from the tension between Neil Tennant's world-weary ennui and Chris Lowe's youthful hedonism. With New Order, the chemistry is not nearly so easy to discern. Critical attempts to rationalise the band's modus operandi have generally resulted in embarrassing failure. Journalists leaking to find "meaning" in their method have invariably foundered in the face of the group's essential normality.

From the early days of Joy Division, they have eschewed conventional interpretation. Those who sought to examine their music with reference to the likes of Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Baudelaire were instantly disarmed when they found themselves sharing a tour van with the late Ian Curtis (Joy Division's mesmeric frontman who hanged himself in 1980), a chap who, by all accounts, was more likely to be found with his face stuck to a beer can than glued to a copy of "Beyond Good And Evil".

When confronted with the epileptic singer's consummate earthiness, the tortured genius theories started looking a tad unconvincing. By the time New Order emerged with 1981's 'Movement" debut LP, punters and public alike were already faced with the problem of explaining the unexplainable.

Throughout the Eighties, New Order gave nothing away, attaining  new levels of excellence with each successive release. Twelve years on from that hesitant first album, it looks as though we're going to have to accept that Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert function by a simple chemical reaction.

Individually, Sumner's exquisitely fragile vocals, Hook's dolorous bass patterns, Gilbert's melodic keyboard motifs and Morris' pummelling machine beats might appear ineffectual (although I, for one, love Revenge, The Other Two and Electronic with a passion, believing wholeheartedly that you can take the wo/man out of New Order, but you can't take the New Order out of the wo/man).

As a unit, however, they are invincible, a soaring, spatial dance force that leaves the listener breathless and most other contemporary music looking wan and weak. No clues there, then.

SO New Order resist analysis. Yet here I am on the second night of my stay with this mysteriously unenigmatic band, still searching for an explanation.

First, I look around Bernard Sumner's hotel bedroom, whore I go for the first of our "formal" interviews. Nothing especially revealing there. I even nip into the bathroom hoping to discover the "truth" - zilch, just a few toiletries and a Paul Theroux novel.

Finally, I ask Bernard himself: what is New Order's secret?

"Hmmmm," he smiles, automatically resisting analysis not because he's a surly, difficult bastard but because, as he says, "I don't know about New Order. I can't see it."

Matters aren't helped by the fact that Bernard's exhausted after a day entertaining legions of local hacks, plus he's suffering from flu, so I leave him and head off to find Hooky in the lobby of the hotel.

And I ask him; how do New Order do it?

"It's just something we do subconsciously," he says, chewing some nuts. "That's why we never talk about it. It's a mystery? That's good, isn't it? Otherwise we could get really pretentious."

There seems to be a massive gap between what you're like as people and the music you make...

"Well, we never wanted it to be like Bruce Springsteen," he laughs. "'Come on, now, clap your hands!' I'd f***ing die if that happened. Disgusting."

Are you aware of a unique chemistry between the four of you?

"I don't think about it, to be honest," he says. "We just like having a laugh."

The inseparable Stephen and Gillian, sitting in the bar, echo Hook's last comment when I ask them about magic, mystery and... New Order.

"It's just a laugh," they say. "We're just a band who have a few nice tunes and records and, er, that's it, really!"

THE point of a pop interview, surely, is to find out what the artist is like and work out how their personality informs their music.

But God only knows what the link is between the unimpeachable "Republic" and the "sordid" facts (and fiction) of day three, during which one member of the band tells me about the time they consummated a relationship in the Sunset Marquis' open-air jacuzzi and another reminisces about putting a bag of vomit through the X-ray machine at Los Angeles airport.

Indeed, Bernard, who earlier on revealed to me that he "would like to watch TV for the rest of eternity" and that he has "half the normal amount of blood" in his body, throws up that afternoon when, after a radio interview at K-Rock, the DJ takes it upon himself to show the singer a photograph of a woman taking a dump in her husband's mouth.

It may also be noted that, like most normal people, New Order like the odd drink and the occasional
stimulant/relaxant. In a recent article, Bernard obliquely refers to 'Blue Monday", still the
biggest-selling 12-inch single of all time, as a "Pounds, Shillings and Pence [i.e. LSD] record". The sessions for "Technique", the group's 1989 masterpiece released at the height of the "Madchester" explosion, are rumoured to have been enhanced by copious quantises of Ecstasy. In fact, "blasted" and "wasted" are regular New Order words.

And on my last day with the band, Bernard will recall a previous visit to the Sunset Marquis and liken it to David Bowie's late Seventies Berlin phase - trapped in his hotel bedroom, Barney had snorted so much cocaine he had to pinch himself to feel anything, so numb was he from the narcotic.

Of course, New Order's glistening dance pop is about as far removed from what we perceive as "druggy" music as it's  possible to get.

So what do these tales of ordinary madness and badness tell us about New Order. Bugger all.

"ACTUALLY, all that stuff I was telling you is what 'Regret' is about," Bernard explains one
afternoon in the exotic garden behind the hotel, and it appears that maybe we'll get an insight into How New Order Work after all.

"The song's about how, after 15 years of living this life, I really want some kind of normality [the
lyrics go, 'I would like a place I can call my own/Have a conversation on the telephone/Wake up every day that would be a start.. ,'].I don't want to get off my head any more."

Hooky, too, lets on more as time goes on, specifically about his double life as a father and a fan of Skin 2 S&M clubs.

"Mind you," he laughs down in the hotel bar, "just cos I go to those clubs doesn't necessarily mean I like getting my arse smacked. Have I ever had my arse slapped? Only by my mother. Nah, it was always a good laugh when me and Bernard started going to those places years ago, cos anyone who takes their sexuality that seriously has got to be worth laughing at.

"It's quite strange having kids," he goes on. "You have all these responsibilities like a house and a mortgage. And then I go to all these bondage parties. But I hate all those Victorian attitudes, like with nudity - you never see your parents naked. I think that's really weird. I don't like it, it's unnatural, and if s why kids get hang-ups.

"My kids will probably get hang-ups the other way - they'll probably start spanking everyone at
school! You can never do what's right. It's like my ex-missus was moaning at me cos Heather [Hook's daughter] was telling everyone she'd seen me dick in the bath, and she was saying I shouldn't
do that. But if you can't show yer daughter yer dick. .. It's like going to bed with your girlfriend and
taking your underpants off under the sheets."

Are you mellowing with age? (Hooky, like Sumner and Morris, is 37.) "Not much chance of that!" he
roars, adding that he won't be changing his ways for his children, either. "They'll probably see me down the Hacienda one day. 'There's me dad, off his head again.' And I'll be going, 'Carry me home!'"

Any regrets?

"I'd like to go back and stop him killing himself," he touchingly refers to Ian Curtis. "It was a good laugh, Joy Division."

Perhaps for the first time all week, here is a glimpse of the raw emotion that informs New Order's sound - specifically Hook's uniquely melancholy basslines.

Earlier on, I asked Bernard if he ever feels down and he told me, "I guess my life has got increasingly happy. Surely that should be the main objective in everyone's life, don't you think? Actually, I can't recall the last time I was depressed."

I ask the irrepressible Peter Hook whether he ever gets depressed and he says, "Everyone's tortured by one thing or another. The whole world is. What tortures me? l dunno, insecurity..  I worry about
everything. I like to wallow. Who doesn't?"

New Order offer the ideal soundtrack for wallowing. It can be a great feeling!

"Oh, it can be a gorgeous feeling..."

WE'RE getting there. But I still need more clues to New Order's greatness.

So I follow the band to Malibu beach where the "Top Of The Pops" performance for "Regret" is being filmed on the set of "Baywatch".

And there by the shore, amid the gleaming musculature of the sun-kissed behemoths and beauties, stand our four pale Mancunian heroes, an oasis of white in a sea of beige.

The area beneath New Order's feet is comprised of equal parts flesh and sand. As "Baywatch" chief hunk David Hasselhoff struts manfully among the crowd. Hooky takes the opportunity to do his crazed metal-biker routine, all low-slung bass, black leather strides and bare chest. Gillian and Stephen slot into place behind their instruments, slightly ill at ease.

And, most surreal of all, Bernard, the epitome of doomed northern romantic outsiderdom, finds himself surrounded by scores of scantily-clad American nymphettes (I'd swear a couple of members of Bikini Kill are here) throwing shapes and playing volleyball beside his microphone.

Poor sod. How will he be able to concentrate?

"Art always comes first, Paul," Bernard reminds me as I negotiate a path through the hordes of human mannequins, "art always comes first."

I can hardly wait to hear my New Order records again.

BUT will they sound the same?

No, better. Richer. Deeper. Wider. Taller. New Order still tower.

Nothing that has happened this week - discovering that Stephen Morris used to be a plumber and that he spent his first night in LA fixing the toilet in his hotel room, or learning that Bernard Sumner's favourite comedian is Benny Hill - has managed to dull the obsession or tarnish the myth.

To celebrate this, I go back to my Sunset Marquis bedroom and play "Republic", an album that has kept me awake for over two months now (some things are more important than, say, health or life or death), on my Walkman.

Trouble is, I get a bit carried away out on the balcony with my knife-on-a-plate Bernard Sumner impressions and pitiful attempts to recreate that inimitably powerful New Order sound with my voice.

Then, all of a sudden, my hideous Karaoke renditions of "Regret", "Spooky" and "Young Offender" are interrupted by the shrill ring of the phone.

Oops, I quickly realise, it's two in the morning. And I've woken someone up!

"Would you mind shutting the f**" up," growls a strangely familiar voice on the other end of the phone. "I'm right underneath your room and I can't get to sleep with all that bloody singing."

Shit. It's Bernard Sumner.

I wonder if New Order will ever speak to me again?

'Republic' is out now on London