1986 10 18 NME New Order Feature

BACK IN the 1970s Barney and Hooky (schoolmates) used to go from Salford into Manchester on a Friday night to a club called Pips.

Pips had about four discos going on at once which, at different times, reflected the changing trends of the decade: soul, funk, punk and ska.

Johnny Marr could be found getting down to Roxy Music and there was a big chart room where everybody could be happy (and where, as ever, all the boys could fight).

Barney and Hookey would wander round all night because they didn't go for the music, they say. “It was just a search to find people to talk to, as most of them wouldn't," Barney remembers. "Maybe I've got no personal magnetism," he adds.

I want my heroes to be captivating, unique and enigmatic and when they're not, their appeal is harder to fathom. Perhaps New Order are more like folk-heroes; ordinary Joes doing a showbiz job and doing it successfully. Everybody says Barney and Hooky are good lads, and no one feels they know Stephen or Gillian well.

New Order's music is danceable and hedonistic and - in contrast to Joy Division's — best appreciated not alone, but among a crowd. It's not just about music; it's more on a par with going out. It's like a trip to Pips; even the bulk of the lyrics are about going out. And like a night on the town sometimes New Order can seem like the best thing in the world (sigh) and sometimes it can seem like you've experienced it all before (yawn).

'Temptation' stirred my heart, 'Confusion' got me bopping, 'Perfect Kiss' threw me and 'Brotherhood' has slightly disappointed me; the singles have been classics, but the LPs have tended to swing from ecstacy to ordinary and back again.

Pop fanaticism is scary and incomprehensible; I'm sure I'm not the only person who loves New Order against my better judgement. I think. Oh why does it have to be so formulaic, cold and monolithic? But then I sat there talking to them last Tuesday knowing they'd provided some of the highest points of my life as a music fan. Along with The Fall, The Smiths, James, Big Flame, June Brides, The Raincoats, Mark Stewart and a hundred others.

What I'm trying to say is that compared to them all New Order are a mainstream commercial pop band. Yes?

"In a way the music's commercial, but we're not," says Barney. "A lot of people — in America especially — want us to be a pop band. It'd make it easier for them. They can't understand it; they're used to weirdo groups playing weirdo music, but they're not used to what seems to them a weirdo group playing commercial music."

Although they make music that no one could find offensive or unappealing,New Order are 'weird' in the context of the music biz because unlike pop stars they seem nonchalant and normal, and as business-people they seem relaxed and uncalculating. Factory's marketing technique, for example, could be described as a cross between low-key and non-existent. The way New Order go about making money is daft. Maybe you should sign to EMI, and go with The Smiths. . .

"If EMI offered us £1 million I'd sign tomorrow," declares Barney (not without a smile on his face).

Has that kind of opportunity ever arisen? "A couple of majors offered us that kind of money when we were Joy Division, but we've never known what to do with things like that. There was another time when Grace Jones wanted to do 'She's Lost Control' for Island Records and she wanted to change it to 'I've Lost  Control' and we thought about it and decided we can't just let her do that. And one night we met a man from Island in a club in Soho and he knew how we felt. He gave us £12; it was like he was just saying, 'Go and buy yourselves a drink lads'."

You should've been cut-throat businessmen and really let it bleed, then?

Hooky: "A lot of the people we have to deal with have really set ideas; they're just businessmen. They judge things - records, videos, or whatever— by whether they can sell them, and not on artistic merit or anything. It's all to do with selling, you see.

"But it's what drives Factory on; it's interesting trying to make your mark on people on your own terms."

IN MANCHESTER these days they very rarely see people they knew in their younger days. I would guess that some of the kids from school have grown up to resent New Order for their success.

"I think they hate us," says Barney. "We were always the dregs at the back of the class."

And look at you now. . .

"Yeah, we've made a career out of being dregs!"

For Hooky the best thing about not moving from Manchester is the "security".

"Because you know the place you know your way around. I could think of moving to a few of the exotic places we've visited, but I can't see any point in moving to London. But do you mean for work or personal reasons?"

Both really; they're completely entwined aren't they?

"Unfortunately, yes."

So tell me another thing that shatters your pop potential. . .

Barney mentions their approach to live performances. New Order are forever changing the songs in the set, playing one-offs and playing away from the main circuit. And he's scathing about bands that do otherwise: "People see bands in big seated halls and the sound's always great and the band plays really professionally, but that's because the band have played exactly the same set in exactly the same way at the same kind of place for five or six nights in a row. It's deceitful of bands; they get to know when every little twitch will get a cheer."

New Order concerts are unpredictable (and if you've ever seen them play you'll know that's an understatement). Barney's got a lot to do; he has to stay upright, think about the lyrics, the guitar chords and the order of the songs. And sometimes this means he never gets the chance to relax.

And there are other pitfalls. "You can do some really embarrassing gigs when you play really badly. In Copenhagen we played to 12,000 Depeche Mode fans and I go to play a guitar solo and it's in a totally different key to everything else. The sound engineer turns the guitar up and all I could see was the front row tittering and the sound crew with their fingers in their ears."

In July they played to 8,000 people at the climax of a day's music at G-Mex. And all agree they were quite stunningly brilliant. As the day had worn on the atmosphere got closer to the atmosphere at a football match (all that mass masculine excitement and celebration). By the time New Order came on the Mexican waves had already started. Since the days of Joy Division it's been less dark overcoats and more trainers. You could say that the difference between Joy Division and New Order is like the difference between art and football. Ha ha.

Among the lads down at the front, Barney reckons "Some of them come to listen to the music and hear the songs and some just want a night out. And it's to do with the kind of places we play: we do a lot of club dates and so the people who've come to see us are standing just a few feet away from us, and there's a real interaction there."

And occasionally this excitement can turn to aggression. New Order seem to attract young lads who see a really forceful image behind them and Factory. Their gigs at places like Blackburn and Preston are wild.

"They're the Blackburn lads," explains Barney, "and they follow us everywhere and we respect them for that. Some of them have got 'Joy Division' tattooed on their legs and their arms."

The crowds aren't always violent, but sometimes the gigs can get quite heavy. Why is this?

"It's connected with Blackburn Rovers, the football team. There was a concert we played at King George's Hall in Blackburn a couple of Christmasses ago just after the Rover fans had been fighting at Carlisle and one of them had killed a Carlisle fan. And everyone knew him and knew he was a New Order fan as well and he asked us to read out a message from him on the stage because he couldn't be there; he was on bail or something and his curfew was 8 o'clock."

But it has to be said, and Hooky says it: "All this violence isn't a reflection of the band; we don't whip the crowd up into a frenzy or anything. It's just the way things are in some of the places we play."

THE LP is called 'Brotherhood' and in that title I thought I'd sensed a recognition of that strong, strange male-bond between the band and the audience. Is that right? Stephen looked aghast, and Gillian —who I wanted to answer this question — had just left the room. But Barney says the title was chosen because it was "neutral".

"Deciding on titles is always a rush at the end of recording, and the LP title comes last of all. We always like to choose something that isn't specific, something neutral."

For Hooky the word 'brotherhood' has got certain connotations: "It says a lot about the way we've all stuck together and stuck with it."

Gillian had returned so I asked her if she ever felt isolated or threatened on stage, surrounded by men. "No, not at all. There are lots more important things to worry about."

'Brotherhood' maps out the territory in which the two main elements of New Order's mu sic tussle; side two is dominated by sequencer-based dance-beat sounds, and side one by guitar-based sounds. These two elements aren't meshed together as completely as they were on 'Temptation' or 'Everything's Gone Green', for example, but according to Barney "all of them have got everything in them."

Everything?

"Well, there are no timbales in 'Angel Dust'," says Stephen, putting the record straight.

If it's a question of Barney making the lyrics up on the spot, do you ever think you're going to run out of them?

"I don't have lyrics as such. I never sit down and think them up and write them down because I think that's the most horrible and boring thing in the world . . ."

"And he ran out of lyrics years ago!" (That was Hooky.)

Barney's lyrics are prosaic and usually undemanding, though not necessarily throwaway; 'Love Vigilantes' and 'All Day Long' are two tracks in particular with plenty to say. But it's always seemed like Barney has consciously written against the grain of expectations. His style (more songs about going out and looking for a good time) is a world away from Ian Curtis's intense, melodramatic writing. Is Barney conscious of this?

"When I first started to do the lyrics I couldn't even have written a good letter. I've written lyrics directly how I speak to people; I don't adorn them just to impress journalists. I just write how I speak."

"It's just because they're such different people," adds Hooky, "whereas the music stayed the same, to start with at least, because it was still us doing it."

On New Order records the vocals are always low in the mix (as they say); Hooky points to this as one of the things that annoy people who think they should be more commercial. "And one of the troubles with records these days is that they're all vocal. If you took the vocal away from some songs you wouldn't recognise them. If you're listening to the radio - in the garage or wherever - it's always the singer you pick out; when you're screwing a wheel on it's the vocal-line you find yourself whistling."

Has a journalist ever written anything about you that's really impressed you?

Barney didn't think that had ever happened. But you do read all your interviews don't you? "Usually, yes. But they always seem to have some kind of weird angle to them."

And that distorts things?

"Yeah. There was one recently that portrayed me as a complete drunkard backstage at The Tube, but I hadn't had a drink all day."

"You were ratarsed!" retorts Hooky.

"No I wasn't; that was the night before—!

So you'd prefer to be portrayed as 'normal'?

"Honest; I just want them to be honest."

"And there's no way you can convey an accurate impression of yourself in an interview," says Hooky. "And people shouldn't expect you to bare your soul to a complete stranger."