1986 09 06 Sounds New Order Feature

ALL ABOARD THE BROTHERSHIP

Not baited and not bearlike, NEW ORDER emerge from the shadow of past misunderstandings and smile benificently upon ROY WILKINSON. They manage to convey their new sense of adjustment and quite a bit besides while remaining evasive, but RUSSELL YOUNG still pictures bared souls 

THREE QUARTERS of New Order are sitting in their extremely nice, extremely comfortable Manchester rehearsal rooms, autographing album covers and waiting.

They're waiting to do an interview (something they never used to do), waiting to set out on tour (another thing they never used to do), waiting to release a single, ‘State Of The Nation' (any moment now) and waiting to release their fourth album, ‘Brotherhood’ (for the end of September).

The album makes me quite willing to cash in all my superlatives in one fell swoop and wish l could afford a compact disc player (my poor old hi-fi can't handle it at all), but right now I’m just watching Bernard/Barney Albrecht/Sumner signing (something I never imagined him doing).

“Who are these for, anyway?"

"Stoke Mandeville — you know, the place where they have bad backs '

"Must be a weird place to live."

“It’s not a town, divvy. It's a hospital!"

In case you don't know, New Order aren't aggressive people and they aren't stupid people. They are friendly and early on a Friday morning they’re really quite unnervingly witty.

The fourth quarter. Hooky (as you say), is late and it’s trme to leave for the pub. which Barney tells us used to have loads of 'character'.

"It was really wild with a woman with metal teeth playing the organ and inflatable pictures of kittens all over."

Now it’s just cold and Barney's deciding that he doesn't like its fresh salmon sandwiches. He’s going fishing for salmon tomorrow but, now he knows what they taste like, he's not so keen on catching any.

Barney’s also had a late night and is feeling a little shellshocked (just to get things going, you understand). So what the hell, how are you feeling Barney?

‘Knackered, and I've got an infection in me eye'

And how are you feeling right now, doing this interview?

"Well, the only reason I'm doing it is because the others want to do it *

So it’s a tolerable evil?

"We've been doing a few of them recently and some of them have been revealing... but I don't
want to do them anymore because .. first, they make you think about what you're doing and then they make you think like the person you’re talking to .. and that's really bad. Also, I’ve noticed that I change through the day. I could give you one set of answers in the morning and then give you a completely different set at night. It's weird.

"But most of all. I think doing interviews can stop the flow of something happening"

He talks a lot about "things happening", about juices in his head and about the subconscious. It all makes him sound a bit of a closet surrealist, but this distracted artist ("I am an artist, but on my own terms') would never willingly pigeonhole himself with such a trade description The nearest he comes is admitting to being "really fascinated by the way people think".

For a moment all this sounds a bit dubious, but step back and consider the group's down to earth, determinedly unostentatious personality together with their evident honesty and awkward charm and then put this beside their music with its disturbing beauty and exhilarating blend of fragility and aggression - the public broadcast of private moments. Then, talk of spiritual things seems as natural as this band.

The last song on 'Brotherhood' is a bizarre, almost throwaway thing which recalls the spirit of the "piss off" line of the second album's 'Your Silent Face'. First it collapses in hysterics, then it dies with the sound of a needle scraping across record grooves.

'Yeah, well the alburn was . . . really hard work. We wrote 70 per cent of it in the studio, and we got to this last song and I started singing it dead serious but when I got to that line about a pig (I think you are a pig/You should be in a zoo) (laughs) well, it just sounded ridiculous and I burst out laughing. We could have done it again but we thought. f**k it, it works as it is."

Your lyrics are often the sing-song rhyming type and the sentiments of your songs are often bitter, petulant dismissals of people. All this gives me the impression that you're a little frustrated, a little inarticulate and that all that somehow comes bursting out in this startling music (It is startling music.)

Barney "I don’t feel inarticulate. I just feel — well, different, a bit. It's just that when I'm thinking about something, I don't feel the need to embellish it because you're only doing that for display purposes, and that's tasteless. If I've got something to write about — which is rare — I just do it as simply as possible.”

But you have brought in some new devices, similar to the tongue in cheek storyline on 'Love Vigilantes'. 'All Day Long' from the new LP reminds me of that.

'Yeah, that’s one of the more serious songs."

The song in question is about child beating and this is what's called interview technique, and
it's tacky because when I ask, Are any of your songs autobiographical’, I'm half hoping he'll say. Yeah, I was molested, I had a dead unhappy childhood.

He doesn't, he just thinks for a moment and starts up with his laconic, habitually slurred speech and says very, very slowly: "Well, some are a bit, but it’s disguised. I could never, never do it straight, it's like baring your arse in public — it's embarrassing ’

In New Order's early days — in what I took to be 50 per cent honesty and 50 per cent not wanting to talk about the obvious (hello, Mr Curtis) - the band always stressed that all they were interested in was the music. But Barney's married now, with a kid. Can things like this alter your perspectives, change your priorities?

“Up to now the music's been the most important thing in my life, but I'm going through a big change in the way I think. That's another reason why I don’t really want to do interviews. I won't have anything to say until I've changed."

What are you changing to?

"Won’t know 'til I get there."

From?

“Just someone who's totally dedicated to one thing - music."

I see. You know you're just a bit idiosyncratic?

“Always have been. I've always felt a bit out of place."

All the time?

"Well, whenever I try to do something that everyone else does."

Like what?

"Like watching telly. I just can't sit there without thinking, why do people do this, what do they get out of it?"

You know, Dallas, Dynasty, that sort of thing. Power, corruption and lies.

BETTER LATE than never, here's Part II. Hooky (as everyone says) has arrived at last. He’s driven me back to the New Order Bat Cave in his big silver sports car (“I like speed") and is being a model interviewee. How does minor cult status suit you?

“I'd have thought we could be hoping for major cult status by now."

Not the band, I meant you. The bass round the ankles, the 'repartee' with the audience, everyone calling you Hooky. You've become something of a mascot.

“I can take it or leave it. A mascot? You calling me a goat or something?"

He’s so relaxed and so self assured that he's almost but just not quite coasting, and (you should know this by now but I'll tell you anyway) he’s not a thug and he doesn’t grunt. He says he doesn't really understand what he’s doing but he tells me that "writing a classic bass riff like on Age Of Consent' is extremely satisfying" and that he's confident that what he's done and is doing will be around for some time.

“When I saw us (Joy Division) on So It Goes, it made so much sense and seemed so fresh. I'm glad Joy Division have that timelessness, 'cos I think it'll last. Like The Doors, who weren't really big until ten years after they finished."

He thinks interviews are a bit futile ("how can you hope to get to understand someone through talking to them for an hour?") but he's doing them, and graciously. As he says, being in a band gets you out a bit and gives you more confidence in yourself.

Hook's very direct and just a bit of a lad. This comes to the fore when he tells me about “just having had enough of one particularly obnoxious heckler at a show and getting the bastard right between the eyes with me headstock".

There's more when I ask what he could do outside a band: “I've always wanted a scrapyard. Just sitting there and getting a few quid for parts and wrecking all the cars — an idea which has always appealed to me."

On the wall of the rehearsal room hangs a T-shirt with Ian Curtis’ face on it, to which someone's added a Hitler moustache. I think that tells you a lot about New Order's new-found adjustment. That and the fact that they sign autographs but don't quite, because Barney's squiggle doesn't contain his names. It really says Phil Barnes.

Here's four “total idiots" with this near perfect company structure behind them and they're making these records like 'Brotherhood' with its spellbinding more-acoustic-than-ever realisation of the slightly flawed 'Low Life’. Cyril Connolly once spoke of stretches of English countryside whose beauty made him feel suicidal and I’m afraid this is just like that.

I ask Stephen Moms about this, saying, Don't you think about what you're doing a great deal, don't you get absored by it and, well, I can imagine it containing the seeds of madness. He just smiles and tells me he's too boring for that.

Stephen and Gillian are, after all, the affable, politely public face of New Order and they don't mind that tag at all (“What's wrong with being pleasant?"). Stephen with his ever so slightly camp voice is utterly unaffected, while Gillian is quiet. (You’re quiet, aren't you? “You guessed it. Yes, I’m very quiet"). She's taking piano lessons and has started to use the black keys recently in New Order.

She doesn’t mind the others taking the lead (“Well, they talk the most, don't they?") but I get the feeling that her muted presence is pretty important to New Order because these four people are now so close that, if you took one away, the whole thing would unbalance. They’ve been together for years. (Barney and Hooky go back almost 20) and It looks like they'll just be going on together In their own determined way. Not a bad album title, ’Brotherhood'.