1993 05 Q New Order Feature

Smile!

New Order had it all, then it began to slide. The drugs got out of hand; the record company disintegrated behind their backs; the album took forever to record. “It’s been like pushing a car with the handbrake on,” they tell Stuart Maconie. And now, worst of all, they’ve got to have their picture taken ...

Barney Sumner slips snugly into line between his three chums. As one, they turn to face the camera. But Barney’s face bears the pained expression of the MD at the Christmas “do” forced to don the

crepe hat. The flesh is willing but his heart isn’t in it. “You don’t think this all a bit Wet Wet Wet, do you?”

In the cavernous, monochrome photographic studio in Ancoats, an area of Manchester that makes Warsaw appear roguish and carefree, New Order are having their picture taken. The proceedings are moving at glacial speed. They are suavely attired ... with exceptions. “This isn’t a full body shot, is it? I hope you can’t see these fucking trainers.” Barney hitches up his well-cut charcoal grey trousers (clothes of yensome Japanese design have been specially purchased for the session) to reveal some distinctly unprepossessing footwear that is probably more deserving of the epithet “pumps”. Peter Hook adjusts the gargantuan collar of his lambswool fisherman’s roll-neck sweater and produces, improbably, a cigarette holder.

Inexorably the spotlight moves on to Stephen Morris, described by his colleagues as “the wacky one”. “Look at the gut on you, Morris!” asserts Sumner baldly. “Here, can we get Stephen a belt or a girdle or something? He looks pregnant.” The baton of Morris-baiting passes easily to Peter Hook. “Here, Steve, you’ve got a shiny nose. You want to get some powder on that, you look ridiculous. Gillian, got any slap for Steve?” Gillian Gilbert disappears into an ante-chamber and reappears with a compact from which she takes a puff and dabs at the unfortunate Morris’s face. His grimace is instantly to familiar to all small boys whose mothers have wiped their faces clean with a spittle-moistened handkerchief. Needless to say, the mirth is unconfined.

If New Order did not exist, it would be vital for the nation's cultural health to invent them: awkward, imperious, remote, daft. Their influence extends to the dancefloor and the football terrace. They are patriarchs of “Madchester", party animals of international renown and past masters of bloody Northern intransigence.

"Do 1 have to sit on this case? I'll get bloody piles. I reckon I must look like a dickhead."

These are men (and a woman) whose story encompasses the ways of British rock these last 15 years. It is a tale full of sound, fury, tragic death, ill health, hedonism, gang violence, football, bankruptcy, even a soupcon of love interest. It is four long years since their last album and, as these titans of post-modernist culture reconvene, of what shall they speak?

Peter Hook turns to Barney Sumner. “You know who you remind me of? Have a guess. Victor bloody Meldrew! You’re a bloody miserable bugger, just like him! Victor Meldrew! One Foot In The Grave!

Don’t you watch that? It’s bloody hilarious! See, I said you were a miserable bugger.. ”

On May 18,1980, the day before his band, Joy Division, were to undertake a tour of America, Ian Curtis was found hanged at his home in Manchester. A note allegedly read: “At this moment, I wish I were dead. I just can’t cope any more.” Joy Division had emerged from the scorched earth policy of punk as a genuinely revolutionary group. Whilst many of their contemporaries were content merely to modify their wardrobes to include a few pairs of straight-leg trousers and take an axe to the Mellotron, Joy Division’s music carried the very real frisson of difference. Stark, angular, shorn of all sentiment and yet oddly moving, it sounded like nobody on earth. It was certain upon hearing their debut album. Unknown Pleasures, that British rock music had made some further geological timescale leap on from Slaughter And The Dogs and Eater.

“We’re not actually that enigmatic,” opines Stephen Morris, New Order’s drummer, “it’s just the accent. I don’t think people can understand what we’re saying.”

“Cool?” reflects Peter Hook. “God only knows why people think we’re cool. Perhaps it’s because we’ve not really played the game of being in a group like some others. Sometimes I think we should have done. We’ve always attracted the weirdest responses. After gigs, people would come up to us and say. You were great tonight. You looked really pissed off. Really miserable!”

Wary of the reverence afforded the works of their youth. New Order have always maintained a robust disrespect for their time as Joy Division. “We were just four lads who liked to get pissed,” comments Barney Sumner (ne Bernard Dicken, aka Bernard Albrecht) and refers to Curtis’ suicide as “the dirty deed". In the wake of this deed, it was Sumner who took on what ’50s sleevenote writers would call “the vocal chores” as the trio embarked on a small American tour in the summer of 1980. Sumner’s vocals have been the subject of much laughter-up-sleeve type activity ever since, although it’s clear that his cracked, vulnerable tones are the perfect complement to New Order’s mechanistic arrangements. But he is sanguine.

“I’m no singer. I’m not. I’m like a spare tyre put on when Ian did the dirty deed. I should have been replaced years ago. But you know, I have found a way of rising to the occasion. Still, I’m no singer. To be a singer you must really feel you have a message to put across in words, and I don’t. I don’t want to tell you anything. If it was up to me, I’d sit here and ignore you. But I do want to make music that will resonate. Resonate like a Beethoven symphony or something, without anything being spelled out.” He interrupts his own reverie cheerily. “I sound like a fucking Buddhist, don’t I?”

Later in the same year that Barney became singer with the newly re-christened New Order, “new girl” Gillian Gilbert, keyboard player and girlfriend of Steven Morris, joined the group, hastening the ongoing process of change. As Joy Division, they had given the green light to a whole swathe of young British males to don the long gaberdine and mutter darkly about post-industrial tristesse (whatever, precisely, that was). Now they had a girl, they had the dreaded synthesizers and worst of all, they had discovered disco. Within two years, they had recorded Blue Monday, still the UK’s biggest-selling 12-inch single and their landmark espousal of dancefloor culture, leaving The Cure to mop up the wallflowers in their serious young audience.

The commercial video of New Order’s 1988 Tokyo concert is entitled Pumped Full Of Drugs. Some students of rock believe there to be an oblique reference to chemical stimulants here. The band have always a certain reputation concerning their prodigious appetite for, shall we say, fun. Whilst the booze, drug and clubbing exploits of fellow Mancunians and Factory labelmates Happy Mondays were being discussed in hushed, awestruck tones, the smart money said that this amounted to a mere buffet lunch for the Order. Even Gillian, uniformly and probably inaccurately seen as the quiet one, will not, by Steven’s admission, “leave the bar until there’s absolutely no-one left to drink with.”

The topic arises as the conversation turns to what Stephen Morris refers to, quaintly, as “the dreaded G word - Mr Giggie". Touring is an activity with which the four have always been seen to have an ambivalent relationship. New Order’s last large-scale enterprise was the now mythic American tour of 1989, a 40-date nightmare odyssey of logistical disasters and Saturnalian excess that left Sumner hospitalised and, according to insiders, the band at each other’s throats.

“I have very painful memories of that tour from a health point of view,” murmurs Barney. “I really don’t want to get that ill again. We were under real pressure, the pressure of the gigs and the pressure of partying. We burned the candle at every end. Once we started, we just couldn’t stop. We were the party monsters that ate Salford. Discos in the dressing rooms, strobe lights, the lot. Every substance you could imagine. It suddenly dawned on me that I was going to end up like Jimi Hendrix. It wasn’t that I never wanted to see them again, I just didn’t want to see them until my head had cleared up.”

“I never wanted to see the bastards again,” chuckles Hooky, “but you change your mind after two months off.” 

“At our time of life, you have to show some respect for your body,” concludes Stephen, soberly, “and, bloody hell, when I think of that tour, those riders..His voice tails off in a mixture of fond remembrance and self-loathing. Nevertheless, plans are afoot for a small-scale tour of Britain in June - “If my Open University course allows,” adds Stephen, with what one assumes is irony.

Barney elaborates on the theme of the band’s emotional and physical health. “We’re not critical enough of each other,” says Barney, “but we’re probably all too critical of ourselves. That’s why I have to get inebriated or whatever before I have the confidence to play sometimes. All my life I’ve had this little voice inside me that says, You’re going to fuck up. That next chord. You’re going to fuck it up. It must be something to do with having shit teachers who’d punch and cane you and instil this low self-regard. I find a couple of drinks can shut that voice up - that, and the experience of being a musician. I’ve nearly silenced it now.”

But the anguished circumstances of their new LP, Republic’s, recording were not, it appears, conducive to abstinence. “We were off our heads sometimes,” recalls Barney. “I don’t know whether you actually make better music that way, or whether you just think you do. But it takes a toll on your personal health. So these days I try to write completely straight. It’s a weird feeling but I’m enjoying it. I can sleep at night for a start. That’s a relief. Some indulgences can keep you awake all night, you know."

Not for New Order lurid flauntings of past excesses. But, if pushed. Barney Sumner will shed some light on certain periods and the diet of the times.

“Listen to Love Vigilantes. Listen to that chordal guitar solo. Listen,” he leans forward conspiratorially, “to how fast it is. Impossible to recreate under normal circumstances. Blue Monday was, how can I put it, a Pounds, Shillings and Pence record [this is an oblique reference to LSD]. That whole year was Pounds, Shillings and Pence year. We cut the record under the influence, which was fucking stupid. A room full of cutting engineers, very straight, boffinish types and us off our heads. It really doesn’t mix. In the end, they finished up sending us to the cafe across the road to get the bloody thing done.

“It can become a fucking nightmare. You get forced into indulging just to keep up with the schedule, just to make the deadlines. And then, you can’t sleep. I was on Halcyon tablets for a year. It was a wonder I didn’t kill about 15 people. They’re only sleeping pills but if you’re living like that, you become slightly psychotic. I wouldn’t say Republic is a straight record, but I’m trying. It has its moments of lucidity.”

It is four years since Technique, their last album and something of a minor modern masterpiece. This lengthy sojourn, as Barney is fond of calling it, was broken only by the small matter of a Number 1 single with the football techno track, World In Motion. Republic will be their first for new label London following the inglorious demise of their long-time home, Factory Communications. Still, despite the consequent problems and myriad disappointments, Barney is wryly keen to stress, instead, the joys of the current reunion.

“It’s like we’ve never stopped. Everything is just as it was on that day. You know Great Expectations? Well, the rehearsal room is perfectly preserved, all covered in cobwebs like Miss Havisham’s house. I haven’t seen that much of them recently ’cos we’ve all had our different little groups to do, but we’ve had lots of bloody business meetings to go to together. I sometimes see Hooky out in clubs but I’m always off my face anyway, so I don’t know who I see.”

Marred by business disasters and the time-consumption of various solo projects, Republic’s recording has been a succession of false starts and hiccups. “We’re such a non-committal bunch of bastards,” remarks Stephen Morris. “We never thought we’d break up, but there was a feeling that if we didn't do something soon, then there wouldn't be any point. We were supposed to start in November 1991 but that was me mistakenly trusting the year planner.”

Recording began in earnest some 18 months ago. initial sessions taking place at Stephen and Gillian's home studio in Macclesfield. It was not an unqualified success. “The problem with working at our studio is we live there,” diagnoses Gillian. “Hooky would come from nine in the morning till seven, then go. Barney would come in at six and carry on till God knows when, so we were on duty all the time. We were studio manageresses really, and we got really brassed off.”

Work continued at Real World under the auspices of producer Stephen Hague, whom they’d first collaborated with on the True Faith single of 1987. It was unusual for the band to hand over production so completely to an outside party and made for all manner of entertaining new working practices. “It was like taking your homework to the headmaster,” laughs Gillian, “and it was good having a scapegoat that we could all moan about. During Technique, it all tended to get a little bit personal.” As Bamey sees it, the advantage of using a producer is that “you don’t have to be there all the time; you can slope off. I mean, I really enjoy being in the studio, but not for a year. And I know they don’t enjoy spending three weeks getting bored shitless listening to me singing the same song.”

Republic is very much the accustomed mix of rock and synthetic elements, the much-loved combination of rhythmic force and melodic gravitas. But by the standards of Technique or World In Motion, there is a muted and sombre tone. This may be due in part to the circumstances of its recording, conducted in isolation as worrying rumours and unsubstantiated reports of Factory’s collapse filtered erratically through. New Order’s sadness at the death of a venture which contributed so much to the pop music of recent years - and a business with which they were intimately involved - is clearly tempered by a bitter exasperation. Stephen talks of Republic’s genesis as “an unbelievable series of emotional upheavals. I’m actually amazed that it’s there. In 12 months I might be able to be objective, but at the moment it’s got such bad associations - and they are nothing to do with New Order.”

Gillian is clearly resentful of the band’s treatment at this time. “We were left in the dark and treated like a hamster on a wheel. Get the LP done! Get the LP done! We knew something fishy was going on but we were told nothing. Then we’re told, Well, we didn’t want to upset you, dears, what with the album and everything. It’s an insult to our intelligence. I’m actually quite angry about it.”

As the band are at pains to point out, you don’t have to be John Harvey-Jones to suggest there is something apparently awry in having both your major money-spinning artists recording albums at the same time, particularly when one is the Happy Mondays and they have been despatched to Barbados to record.

“We learned it ourselves when we did Technique in Ibiza,” acknowledges Stephen. “Everything takes longer when you go somewhere sunny.” But any suggestion that New Order might have saved the day by completing Republic more quickly or agreeing to tour is hastily shot down. Barney is adamant: “No way. They should be glad we did take our sojourn. They owe us enough money as it is. Imagine how much they’d have owed us if we’d been touring all that time. They’d have owed us an arm, a leg and a dick. I’m glad Republic wasn’t finished on time because we wouldn’t have got paid. Sorry and everything but I’ve got a mortgage to pay.”

Peter Hook places another cigarette in its holder and is typically candid: “Factory was Factory. It was all very arty and not very efficient. That was its charm. Like our charm. The fuck-ups are part of it. People thought Factory were this brilliant, classy, adventure ... and they go down owing five million quid.”

And so for all of New Order, Republic comes tinged with sour memories: Gillian remembers “interminable bloody meetings, Barney waving his bits of paper, arguing about getting that bloody settee re-covered in Dry” (Factory’s showpiece city centre bar).

“I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out,” says Barney, “but it’s been like pushing a car with the fucking handbrake on.”

None of the members of New Order has been idle, of course, during their sabbatical from the collective. Three offshoot bands have been in effect: Peter Hook’s Revenge, Stephen and Gillian’s self-effacing Other Two project (album to follow in the autumn) and, most successfully, Barney’s Electronic collaboration with Johnny Marr. Not since the heyday of Yes and Kiss has a band tried this “time off to find our own space, reclaim individual identity” gambit. Given that none of these solo projects (a term they all wince at) involved Cajun music, string quartets or FM power ballads, the interested observer can but wonder what they got out of the experience that they couldn’t get from New Order.

“Paid,” says Stephen to much laughter.

“I didn’t have to be democratic,” asserts Barney. “I enjoyed being quite centralised, which is a posh word for being self-centred.”

“I learned a lot,” says Hooky, conclusively from the depths of his polo neck. “I learned about production. I learned about singing. Learned how difficult it is. Now I know why he’s such a miserable bastard all the time.”


MOVEMENT 1981
The long shadow of Joy Division lies over this debut album by New Order, from Martin Hannet’s barren and echoey production to the sense of resignation behind songs such as Doubts Even Here, but already the palette of sound is being expanded to include that mournful melodica, keyboard washes and propellant, scratchily funky guitars.
★ ★ ★

POWER, CORRUPTION AND LIES 1983
New Order's transitional album, rendered strangely, powerfully atmospheric by the lack of any one defining style. There are moments of somnolent near-dub, effervescent guitar rock and clear evidence that the group were already looking to the clubs of New York for inspiration, particularly seen on 586, which is essentially a first draft for Blue Monday. The famous couplet: You've caught me at a bad time/So why don't you piss off sees Barney finding an oblique, mischievous voice of his own.
★ ★ ★ ★

LOWLIFE 1985
Arguably their finest moment, and produced after the band had established themselves as a unique proposition by virtue of the modernist techno-rock of Blue Monday and Confusion. Now a major act, Lowlife finds them brimming with confidence and sporting a juggernaut-capacity sound comprising rock’s emotional rage and dance music’s physical kick. Highlights abound, from the twisted country and western of Love Vigilantes to the transcendent beauty of Perfect Kiss.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★

BROTHERHOOD 19865
Something of a Son of Lowlife and often overlooked, nestling as it does between two superior albums. It's a refinement of the Lowlife blueprint, gleaming sophistication with the same glowering sense of unease. Still lots to recommend it (such as the terrific Bizarre Love Triangle) but more for the initiated than the first-time buyer.
★ ★ ★

SUBSTANCE 1987
Excellent by definition, since it collects together all the band's singles to date plus the then-current release, True Faith. Here, the full range of their achievement as one of rock’s most consistent and innovative bands is apparent. Also contains all the B-sides to date, which will delight those who cannot live without the instrumental version of Thieves Like Us but may prove heavy-going for those who just want the hits.
★ ★ ★ ★

TECHNIQUE 1989
A pretender to Lowlife’s crown, Technique was recorded in Ibiza at a time when that holiday hotspot had established itself as epicentre of the new club culture. The easy boisterousness of the Ecstasy generation is married to New Order’s fierce ensemble rock playing and the result showcases a band at the height of their powers. A spectacular triumph, all the more remarkable when one considers the sundry distractions on offer during recording.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★

THE PEEL SESSIONS1990
Two radio sessions (transmitted in January 1981 and June 1982), much bootlegged by fans before being issued first as EPs and then in this format. Actually bleached out versions of songs done better elsewhere but somewhat redeemed by a strangely marvellous version, unique to these sessions, of reggae innovator Keith Hudson’s Turn The Heater On. The rest is for devotees only.
★ ★

LIVE IN CONCERT 1992
A pre-Technique greatest hits, actually recorded (for the BBC) at Glastonbury on June 19, 1987. That night, New Order were a laser-drenched, night-filling monster, but much of the magic is lost in the transition to tape. The almost architectural splendour of the closer, Age Of Consent, however, still cuts deep.
★ ★ ★