1999 12 30 Timeout New Order Feature

Bizarre Love Quadrangle

Since 1993, original Man sourpusses New Order have been in and out of the tabloids, on and off Prozac and barely on speaking terms. But on New Year's Eve, they'll headline 'Temptation' at Alexandra Palace, This can't mean they like each other, can it? Interview Peter Paphides Photography Trevor Ray Hart

'I'd rather be in bed to be honest. But I suppose this will do.’ Bernard Sumner is not a well man. A 12~hour session with Alex from Blur has taken him from the Groucho to a series of other West End bars and back to the Groucho in time for breakfast. As a result, his features are even paler than his bleached hair, and his horizontal frame occupies three seats in the cellar bar of the Landmark Hotel.
As drinking buddies go, Blur's fop-star bassist and the street-smart frontman of New Order seem an unlikely pairing. But since mutual buddy Keith Allen introduced them. it’s been a beautiful, if hazy, alliance: 'I don't know how Alex does it,’ he says, rubbing his bleary eyes. ‘It's not natural to drink more than you weigh. Which I suppose explains why I feel so rough.’ Indeed, the only way things could get any worse would be if you had an absurdly chirpy mate by your side insisting that you join him on a lengthy afternoon session. A mate, in fact, like Peter Hook.

'Bernard! Stop messing with your knob."

‘I'm just checking to see if it's still there. . .’

'But not in front of the lady. .. ’

Bernard turns sideways and extends his hand towards the waitress.

'Shandy? she enquires.

'That's Bernard's,’ says Hook. ‘He's got a dicky stomach.’

‘Aye, l have,’ confirms the singer. ‘Could you drink it for me as well please?'

Peter Hook can't remember the last time someone called him by his real name. Since the demise of Joy Division. it's been Hooky plain and simple - a suitably iconic name for the man who has singlehandedly taken the boring old bass guitar and turned it into a low-slung implement of Viking savagery. Today, though, bereft of customary stubble and leather trousers, his presence is anything but threatening. In fact, Hooky is so happy he makes Uncle Remus seem like... like, well... like a member of New Order - but the old New Order currently gathering dust in our mental filing cabinets: a dank Manc quartet who emerged from the ashes of Joy Division after their singer killed himself. A New Order whose enigmatic record sleeves suggested an austerity entirely in sync with the drizzly city that spawned them. A New Order, in fact, of which the four musicians gathered here deny all knowledge.

Not without good reason. A single stereotype goes a long way - far enough, in this case, to overshadow the stellar string of effervescent disco classics which propelled them to pop immortality. ‘Blue Monday’, ‘Confusion', ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’, ‘True Faith’. Not only did these songs teach earnest young men in overcoats to dance, but they were also a key inspiration for the invention of techno in America, which in turn helped inspire New Order to even greater heights with ‘True Faith’, ‘Fine Time’ and 'World In Motion'.

Time, then, to update the file. And what better place to start than the primary source of those misconceptions, the name itself? At the beginning, people inferred fascist connotations, a furore exacerbated by Joy Division's rather silly decision to name themselves after the prostitution wing of concentration camps. Two decades on, it’s something the band feel they can be frank about. Bernard recalls that ‘our manager, Rob Gretton, wouldn’t let us have Khmer Rouge and Black September because of the terrorist overtones, so he said: "Why don't you call yourselves New Order?” The thinking was that it sounded neutral. He’d seen the phrase in a book he'd been reading about Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia. What a fucking idiot! No, actually, we were the fucking idiots, because we didn’t know any better.’

If only they’d listened to drummer Stephen Morris and keyboard player Gillian Gilbert, both of whom were brimming with ideas for band names. Barney, Stephen And Peter and Barney And The JDs were two of the less enigmatic suggestions. But for sheer mystique-shattering idiocy, none comes close to the one name that still exasperates Hooky and Bernard. ‘Oh yeah!’ remembers Stephen. ‘1 was lobbying for The Witch Doctors Of Zimbabwe. But no one else seemed keen.’

 ‘Too fucking right,’ scowls his disgusted bassplayer. ‘We refused to join.’

‘I was amazed,’ says Gillian, ‘when we got into trouble again. I just thought we were called New Order because of the new line-up!’

Bernard: ‘What? Like the new order of the group? That’d be really fucking corny.’

‘Well,’ giggles the chastised keyboard player, ‘that’s me!!!’

Whatever. The important thing to consider is that, somehow, you can’t quite imagine The Witch Doctors Of Zimbabwe at Alexandra Palace serenading 15,000 frenzied fans into the final year of the millennium. And yet, come the ‘Temptation’ all-nighter on New Year’s Eve, that’s exactly what New Order will be doing. Indeed, it’s what they’re here to talk about. But over the next few hours, as the glasses on the table accumulate, a different story emerges. They’ll allude to the tensions that escalated during the recording of 1993’s ‘Republic’ album in a manner that suggests not only rediscovered humility, but its precursor: the hole that opens up in your life when the thing you most treasured falls apart. But most of all, they’ll take the piss out of each other with a zeal which suggests that, even if love and hate really aren’t the same thing, then they must at least share a postcode. According to Hook: ‘It’s not that we actually like each other. But it’s like a family. You hate your brother, but you still like to see him once in a while.’

New Order say the reason they grew tired of one another was simply because it wasn’t fun any more, but ask them why it wasn’t fun any more and talk turns to Tony Wilson and his Factory empire. May 1993, they say, was a particularly strange month. In the same week that they performed their new single, ‘Regret’, on "Pop Of The Pops’ via a satellite link from the ‘Baywatch’ set, a string of bad business deals brought New Order to their knees. The Hacienda - the Manchester club with which Factory had become synonymous - was ravaged by debts and gang warfare. Following the disastrous return on Happy Mondays' final album, the money had to come from somewhere: ‘We worked out,’ says Stephen, ‘that week for week, we were actually paying each punter £10 to walk through the doors of the Hacienda. Which wouldn’t matter so much, but whenever I tried to get in, they’d make me pay! They wouldn’t believe I was in New Order.’

Hooky: ‘When Tony said we should give something back to Manchester, we didn’t think he meant literally.’

No wonder Bernard looked distracted on that sunny LA afternoon: ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t all those women in swimsuits,’ he says: ‘I think they’d sent out the reserve team that day.’

‘It was madness,’ agrees Hook. ‘Dividing your time between a recording studio and business meetings is no way to maintain the friendship of your colleagues.’

‘But it’s still annoying when you think back to the fuck-ups,’ says Bernard. “‘Blue Monday”, right? Biggest selling 12-inch single of all time and the sleeve cost so much that we didn’t make a penny. We used to laugh about it though, didn’t we?’

Hooky: ‘Yes. I know. We still do, because if we didn’t, we’d be fucking hanging off the rafters.’
Given the demise of their ex-singer, it’s probably not surprising that New Order favour gallows humour.

Personally, I found it difficult,’ admits Peter Hook when discussing the dissolution of New Order. ‘It’s like you’re a lost soul in the wilderness. You’ve been doing something for so long that you didn’t know what to do. For a while you try and do something completely different because something is better than nothing. But in the end it doesn’t feel natural.’ Hook is the most visibly relieved to be back in familiar company not surprising, considering his friendship with Bernard stretches back to the first year of Salford Grammar School. Post-1993, they only spoke three times over as many years. But if anything, the pervading air of disenchantment seemed to affect the reflective frontman even  more. He’s an engaging contradiction, Bernard Sumner. His knotted eyebrows are like security guards in an otherwise convivial club. Damon Albarn recently denounced his lyrics as ‘shit’, but that seems a little cruel considering the sheer poetry of yearning that infuses them. An only child who never knew his dad, Sumner - himself a father of three - had more cause than most to be upset by the death of his mother in 1992. Amid a backdrop of depression and insomnia, he went back to Electronic, the part-time ‘supergroup’ he’d formed in 1991 with ex-Smith Johnny Marr, but the creative process was diverted when a rather timely phone call came through from psychologist Oliver James. ‘He phoned me up,’ remembers Bernard, ‘and told me he was making a TV programme testing Freud’s theory that artists create art because they’re deficient in some other way. So his idea was to put me on Prozac and so if it affected my ability to write.’

‘It was a great idea. But the next thing I knew I was listening to Radio I in the car and then; was this story about how I had writer’s block and I was hearing voices in my head. I was like: What the fuck’s this?! It turned out that his voice was over some film of me, coming out with all this stuff. This was three days before broadcast, I phoned him and said: “Read me what you said. Right, if you don’t take that out, I’m gonna fucking sue you.”

At least Freud emerged from the exercise intact. It took Electronic a monumental two years to make their second album, the rather laboured ‘Raise The Pressure’. ‘Prozac did actually rob me of the ability to write tunes and lyrics for a while. It did get rid of my insomnia, but I don’t think I’d ever take it again. The idea of dependency scares me.’

Peter Hook agrees. He also resorted to Prozac round about this time, but its effects couldn’t have been more different. ‘It made me sweat like a fucking pig,’ he declares to the amusement of his colleagues. Did it cheer him up? ‘Did it fuck! Prozac takes three weeks to work. You’re better off taking ecstasy. That takes 45 minutes...'

But, as is so often the case, the final word on the subject comes from Stephen. ‘I think antidepressants are overprescribed,’ he avers with a professorial stroke of his huge chin. ‘My dad was given them for chicken-pox. Sometimes I think you can go to the doctor and as long as you say you haven’t got depression, you can come away with antidepressants.’

Stephen doesn’t speak much, but when he does his words carry a grandfatherly authority. Even quieter, on his right, is Gillian Gilbert. In fact, her inscrutable giggling outnumbers words by six to one. By most accounts, Stephen and Gillian are the archetypal married unit. Not only were they least affected by the break-up, they were also zen enough to send up their meagre profile in the group when they released an album as The Other Two. They only recently got around to having their first child, a baby daughter called Tilly, but Gillian and Stephen’s relationship predates New Order. She was working on Manchester market stalls selling lingerie when the rest of Joy Division reconvened following the death of Ian Curtis. They needed someone to play keyboards, so Gillian was asked to help out for three months. No one said anything about joining after that, but 17 years later her importance in maintaining the equilibrium is undoubted. Nothing gets too ugly if there’s a giggler on hand. The Other Two’s second album, due out in the spring, was recorded at their Macclesfield farm. Isn’t it stressful trying to run a farm and make a record at the same time?

Stephen: ‘Not when you’ve got no animals.

Gillian: ‘We have!!! Two dogs!!!’

Gillian has a way of talking in exclamation marks.

‘We’ve got a guinea pig as well!!!’

Isn’t that a bit strange? A farm without animals?

‘Well, there are these cows,’ explains Stephen, ‘but they’re not ours. We just let them eat the grass.’

So, just to recap: this menagerie, it comprises some borrowed cows and a guinea pig?

‘Well, the fields came with the house,’ comes Stephen’s exasperated response, ‘so we let the cows on to the grass, to keep it short...'

Peter Hook is just beginning to get tipsy. ‘The only reason Steve got a farm is because he loves shoving his hand up cows’ arses. You know what you should do with cows? Cut their heads off and stick ’em on a wall.’

Sorry?

‘My wife wanted a Friesian cow’s head stuffed and mounted.’

Gillian is confused. ‘A cow?l!l Not a bison or an antelope?!!!’

‘Nope. A stuffed cow’s head. And whatever my wife wants, she gets.’

Bernard is confused. ‘A stuffed cow’s head? What for?’

‘That’s what she’s always wanted.’

Stephen is confused, too. ‘On a plinth?’

‘It’s in the hall. I ordered it from Get Stuffed in lslington. And,’ he adds proudly, ‘I had to pay extra because they had to work all weekend.’

A light comes on in Stephen’s head. ‘Oh, we got the rat from there, didn’t we?’

Gillian: ‘I’ve still got the rat.’

Peter Hook is in love, a fact which, along with countless margaritas, explains the Ready Brek glow of  warmth presently surrounding him. Last year he married 27-year-old Rebecca following a courtship which, surprisingly, began with a blind date. Three months ago, they had a baby daughter, Jess,  adding to the two children from his first marriage to Jane. Given Hook’s high profile in between those two relationships, we scarcely need reminding what he got up to. When his marriage to Caroline Aherne seemed to be going well, we’d see ‘Hooky and the boys’ giving it some serious leather trouser action as Mrs Merton’s house band. Following the collapse of New Order and the demise - with Factory - of Hook’s impenetrable side project Revenge, this seemed like an easy diversion pending the formation of a ‘proper’ group. But an acrimonious split, exacerbated by a shared predilection for the occasional drink, became downright messy one night when Hook and Aherne turned up to the launch of the Manchester branch of Bill Wyman’s Sticky Fingers restaurant with their new partners.

It wasn’t long before Bernard Sumner heard about the events of that evening. The following morning, he ambled along to his local newsagent and suddenly rumbled the identity of the newly bleach-cropped bloke adorning every single one of that day’s tabloids. It was Peter Hook laying into Aherne’s new flame, Matt Bowers and - in the case of one misdirected kick - Aherne herself. What went through Bernard’s mind at that point?

‘Good question,’ says Hook, leaning forward to hear his friend’s response. But before Bernard can even speak, the realisation dawns upon Hook: ‘You know what? I bet you laughed your fucking chonker off, didn’t you? I know you did! Go on!’

‘No!’ protests Bernard, but it’s no good. He’s doubled up.

‘And you,’ hisses the bassist, turning to Stephen and Gillian, ‘I bet you were concerned!’

Bernard: ‘Hooky, you’ve got to admit. It was a great moment!’

‘Yeah,’ comes the response, ‘but you know what? I wish I’d done it two years earlier. I wouldn’t have had to put up with half the fucking grief.’

Finally, Bernard Sumner regains his composure. ‘It’s a great fucking photograph. The first thought that came into my head was: What the fuck has he gone and done now? If you'd posed it, you couldn’t have got it better. The composition is just beautiful.’

Hook: ‘But if you'd posed it you couldn't have got the emotion on my face. It had everything in it. Me new wife. Him. That fucking woman.'

So there were no phone calls from fellow band members, enquiring after their bassist's mental welfare?

Bernard: “Ring him? What for? It was all there in the press! Mind you, he set that up though, didn’t he?'

Who set it up? The newspaper?

‘No,’ says Hook. picking up the story, ‘her boyfriend. He went over to the photographers and said: “Get over there. because I’m gonna front the cunt, and then I’m gonna do him... and so when he came  over, he fucking got it, didn’t he? There was actually a follow-up story in the Sun after that. Someone wrote to the Sun and said: “Hooky’s very popular in Manchester and if that cunt ever shows his face again, we’re going to kick his head in. You tell him he’s dead!”

The final irony in all this, of course, was that Bowers did end up dead. He was later diagnosed as having stomach cancer. Perhaps unsurprismgly, Hooky isn’t sympathetic. When Bernard attempts to ascertain the time elapsed between the incident and Bowers’ death, Hook, with precision timing, chirps: ‘After I kicked him in the groin"

Bernard: ‘Didn’t you kick him in the stomach?’

‘I did!' comes Hook’s boast. ‘And I nutted him! He was a wanker, though. It was like the school playground: “You stay away from Caroline! She’s mine now!” He fucking pushed me and I accidentally hit Fred the weatherman off “This Morning”. He was standing just behind. Strange evening, really.’

‘Bloody right,’ concurs a beleaguered Bernard Sumner, finishing off his shandy. ‘I’ll drink to that.’

If Peter Hook’s personal lows during New Order’s extended break were well documented, then so were his musical highs. It was Monaco, the group he formed with ex-Revenge cohort David Potts, who scored the biggest hit of all the various New Order side-projects with ‘What Do You Want From Me’.That he did it with what sounded like a great lost New Order single was no accident.

Hook: ‘Monaco really came about one day when Pottsy said: “Why do you bother with all this shit when you should just play bass? Because that’s what you’re best at.” ’ Pottsy was right. While it would be harsh to attribute their sound to just one member, you always know when you’re in the company of a great New Order song because of the seismic rumble that counterpoints Sumner’s plangent vocals. It’s there on early hits like ‘Temptation’ and ‘Blue Monday’, and it’s the foundation stone of their two greatest albums - 1986’s classic ‘Lowlife’ and the ecstatic Detroit-Ibiza collision that was ‘Technique’ in 1990. Monaco’s ‘Music For Pleasure’ wasn’t just a good album. It reminded Sumner, Gilbert and Morris that there was something New Order did that no one else could do. ‘There was no doubt,’ says Sumner, ‘that the Monaco single sounded like New Order. But I thought it was a really great song.’

They can't remember who made the first approach, but a headlining spot at this year’s Reading Festival was an appropriate comeback, given that their farewell had taken place on the same stage five years previously. ‘I think the overriding feeling after that,’ says Hook, ‘was that we’d had a chance to step back. And with that added detachment, we realised that: a) the songs were wonderful; and b) we didn’t hate each other that much.’

Not only did the Reading resurrection create some spectacle in what’s been a rather muted year for great pop happenings, it also threw into sharp relief what - had anyone spoken Mandelsonian in the ’80s - we might have referred to as the group’s ‘perception problem’. Here were New Order returning to a music scene comprising mutton-faced glumsters like The Verve, the Manics, Radiohead, Cornershop and The Prodigy. All of a sudden, the band responsible for ‘In A Lonely Place’ and ‘Dead Souls’ seemed like the Banana Splits. As four people who have endured their own share of adversity, can they shed any light on what’s making all these groups so miserable?

‘Well,’ challenges Peter Hook, ‘what do you think would make someone in a band sad? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the fucking guitarist getting more girls than you are. That’s one thing. And then the drummer might come in and go, “Who’s drunk all the bitter?" These are the things that piss bands off.’

There is one exception, of course, on that aforesaid list, and that’s Manic Street Preachers. Joy Division lost Ian Curtis in comparable circumstances to those that saw Richey Edwards disappearing in February 1995. Both had achieved huge cult status and were on the verge of their first big American tours. Edwards and Curtis were also the bands’ public faces, who left their colleagues to try and find some kind of new direction. ‘1 think it must be weird for the Manics,’ mulls Stephen, ‘because they’ll never know for certain if he’s dead.’

‘Personally,’ says Bernard, ‘I think he’s still alive, that guy. Why? I don’t know. I just do. He’ll turn up in a few years.’

Stephen: ‘It’s harder to deal with when someone goes suddenly. That’s what was interesting about the Diana thing. You saw that repeated on a national scale. If someone’s been ill, you can come to terms with it. But because it was a car crash, you just end up with conspiracy theories. It was the same with Ian Curtis. After a while, people started coming up with mad theories.’

Hooky begs to differ. He saw ‘Kurt And Courtney’ - Nick Broomfield’s attempt to uncover the ‘real’ reason for Kurt Cobain’s suicide’ - and ‘thought it was the best fucking thing I’ve seen in years’. Hooky cites the recording of a phone call made by Love and Cobain threatening to kill a journalist as evidence of Love’s capacity to do something extreme. But when it’s pointed out to him that the voice you hear making the threat is Kurt’s, he counters: ‘Yes, Kurt was speaking, but she was fucking egging him on in the background! You could obviously tell that he didn’t really want to do it.’

It’s hardly surprising though, is it, that Courtney Love tried to ban the film, considering what it tries to imply!

‘Look! She went to this guy in LA who said she'd tried to hire him for $50,000 to make it look like suicide.’

Bernard, who's been tutting for the last two minutes, finally weighs in: ‘Bollocks! Why should she want to kill him?’

Hooky: 'She didn’t kill him. But in the film it says she tried to hire this guy...’

Bernard: ‘She didn’t kill him! She was bloody broken-hearted. I’m up for freedom of speech, but that's ridiculous. Put it this way, I think I'd be offended if someone had said I’d killed Ian Curtis'.

Hooky: ‘But Barney, you didn’t kill him. You were with me!’

Uh-oh. You could park your car in the ensuing pause.

Hooky: ‘Come on! It was a joke! It was a joke! I know what killed him. It was that fucking rack in the kitchen.’

Sometimes you forget this is the same band who refused interviews for three years because they didn’t want to talk about Ian Curtis’ death. Perhaps it’s something to do with the ex-Joy Division members of New Order recently turning 40, but they seem to have acquired a renewed sense of pride in the Joy Division years.

At Reading, they performed ‘Isolation’ and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ to an ecstatic response. They’ve also just recorded a John Peel session featuring guest appearances from Primal Scream in which they tackle ‘Isolation’ and ‘Atmosphere’. They were even going to do ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ on ‘TF I Friday’ the other week, until Chris Evans requested they do ‘Regret’. Perhaps a younger group might have sulked, but New Order seem philosophical: ‘Chris Evans hasn’t got any real power,’ points out Hooky. ‘The people with real power are the fans that buy your records, not fucking “TF I Friday”.’

And it’s for those fans that New Order are frenetically rehearsing a set of hits and forgotten classics in time for New Year’s Eve. After that, there’s the promotion to be done for new albums by Electronic and The Other Two, all of which leaves Sumner clear to work on New Order’s first album in six years. Given that, these days, they’re all too busy looking after their kids to emulate the ecstasy benders of their twenties, one wonders exactly what a new New Order album would amount to. Not Hooky, though: ‘It’ll sound like this: NYEEURWRRGH!!! How the fucking hell do we know until we do it?’

Well, it probably wouldn’t be as dancey, would it?

‘I think you might be right,’ concurs Bernard. ‘It’d be nice to write together as a band rather than sit around staring at a computer screen.’ The current mood is neatly summed up by Hook: ‘I don’t care what we do as long as we’re happy doing it.’

They’ve yet to finalise a set for Ally Pally, but Bernard promises no shortage of surprises. Mind you, quite how many of those surprises are down to his slowly intensifying alcohol consumption is anyone’s guess: ‘How about if instead of “World In Motion” we do the 1970 World Cup song? I’ve always preferred it.’ With psychic synchronicity Hooky and Bernard launch into a rousing chorus: ‘BACK H-O-O-OME! THEY’LL BE THINKING ABOUT US IN EACH AND EVERY WAY!’

Bernard: ‘We’ll get Keith Allen to help us. It’ll be brilliant!’

Hooky: ‘Even better! We’ll do “New Dawn Fades” [dark remnant of Joy Division era] and we’ll put Gillian out in the middle of the stage, and her rising up as the song begins. She’ll be there at a table with candles on it and a single red rose. Anything is possible.’

Anything at all? Well, given the tribulations of the last five years, how about a version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on the stroke of midnight?

New Order are united in horror at the idea.

‘“Auld Lang Syne”?’ hisses Peter Hook. “‘Auld Lang Syne”? Answer me this. Can you fucking dance to “Auld Lang Syne”? People used to say Joy Division were miserable, but we never came close to “Auld Lang Fucking Syne” for total fucking slash-your- wrists doom.’

‘Dead Souls’ it is, then. Happy New Year.

While you were out.

Five things that have happened since New Order made their last record.
1. Turning forty
Hooky: ‘l honestly didn't notice. I’ve been In a mid-life crisis ever since I was 17.'
Bernard: ‘One weird thing about getting older is having a 16-year-old son who's into the same music as me. That's very scary. He's into stuff like Sneaker Pimps and Chemical Brothers. I don't think he finds me embarrassing, although he did stop me going on “Shooting Stars". He said all his mates watch it and he doesn't like being the centre of attention.’

2. Brltpop
Bernard: ‘Damon Albarn's a cockney wanker, isn't he? A fucking cockney wanker who's not even a cockney.’

3. The death of Diana
Hooky: ‘Very sad that she died, but I don't understand all the fuss.’
Bernard: ‘l was driving to the newsagents and I switched Radio 4 on. The first thing I heard was someone saying that Diana’s body would be brought home on the plane. I thought it were some bad taste Radio 4 play.’

4. The New Labour government
Bernard: ‘I think it's a good thing they got in. People moan about New Labour just because people will moan.’
Hooky: ‘Bernie, can I actually butt in here? There's nothing New Labour about the way Tony Blair travels. He’s spent millions travelling around in private jets and he’s had a double bed put in for him and Cherie.’
Bernard: ‘He’s the Prime fucking Minister! Bill Clinton has a bloody fleet of 747s!’
Hooky: ‘But Blair's supposed to be New Labour! That means that he’s working for the people - not like the Tory fat cats.’
Stephen: ‘Hang on! That’s old Labour. You’re getting them mixed up.’
Hooky: ‘Well, why don’t we vote for the Conservatives then?’
Stephen: ‘Because there's New Labour.’
Hooky: ‘Yeah, and they don 't give a fuck.’
Stephen: ‘We thought we 'd give them a try.’
Hooky: ‘At the end of the day, whoever you vote for, it’s the government that gets in.’
Stephen: ‘But it’s New Labour!’ [etc, etc...]

5. New Order being used on ads
Bernard: ‘We do occasionally get asked to re-record our songs for adverts. There were a couple over the last five years I wish we’d done. In fact, we did actually record one for Sunkist to the tune of “Blue Monday”. I found it quite hard to go through with it, so I stuck a big piece of card in front of the microphone and wrote “$100,000" on it, but in the end our manager wouldn't let us use it.’ Hooky: ‘The other one was even better. Heinz asked us to do one to “World In Motion"...
[sings] “We've got the sauce in motion!
Why we turned that one down I’ll never know.
These bastards refused.’

New Order headline ‘Temptation’ at Alexandra Palace on New Year’s Eve. See Music listings for details.