1986 10 Mix New Order Feature

INTERVIEW: CHRIS HEATH

It's easy, looking back, to see how New Order became so mysterious, to see why they've managed over the years to give so little away. Back in the late '70s when the three male members were in Joy Division no-one wanted to talk (or listen) to them, and when eventually they did achieve a small measure of success it was to singer and lyricist Ian Curtis that journalists flocked. He danced on stage as if repeatedly jolted by an electric prod in his spine and wrote dark brooding melodramas that he refused to explain — people automatically assumed that he was the group's genius. The other three, whatever they were called, were by and large treated as the able backing musicians, the channel through which Curtis' genius was allowed to explode (never mind that, even then, they wrote all the music).

Their silence was only hardened when Curtis died in 1980 — hanging himself one evening in circumstances which no-one has been able to, or more likely wanted to, explain. The other three carried on (drafting in Gillian soon afterwards) but they weren't keen on talking to anyone — doubtless a mixture between fear at having to talk, or even think about, the painful past, and their own self-confessed doubts about their ability to succeed without Curtis.

Soon though their silence became more than that. It became an essential part of the New Order style. They treated their audience with an amused contempt — swearing at those who dared request songs, belting them if they got too close, replacing song lyrics with barrages of expletives and categorically refusing to play encores. They delighted in refusing to calm the uproar when the name New Order was recognised as that of a neo-Nazi group and Peter Saville's sleeve designs were recognised as "borrowed" from fascist posters of the '30s. And when they consented to interviews at all they refused to bide by the usual "pop star vs interviewer" conventions and were instead deliberately evasive, awkward and argumentative, saying very little at all of substance. Factory kept its policy of not advertising records, they kept to their policy of not promoting them or giving any sign they cared about their success. Journalists were, predictably, furious. New Order simply didn't care.

But, in the last couple of years. New Order's attitude has softened. And while they still don't seem wholly committed to success today they also can't be bothered to be that horrible either. They're being reasonably helpful by their standards. They refuse to pose for photos of course but they agree to be snapped as they sit round and Barney relents on an earlier decision not to talk. Meanwhile they, in no more than ten minutes, agreed their UK tour itinerary with their tour manager. One place up north is out — "that was where we asked for sandwiches and they brought us four". Another is in — "they make a nice cup of tea there". A venue in the south west is dismissed — "I had to buy a new pair of shoes there the floor was so dirty". Once it's tied up I'm allowed to lead them next door, one by one, to the grotty kitchen/office, and ask them questions.

BERNARD SUMNER

Bernard Sumner (Barney, as he is known) fidgets compulsively in front of me. He gives the wall a frightening stare. He looks more like a fugitive on the run than a pop star. "I don't know if you know," he begins, "but I didn't want to do this interview. I don't want to do any interviews any more." One look at his face is enough to tell that this is more than a sudden fit of pop star pique. "I want to stop and think about things," he explains, "to look at the past and look at the future. I need to think about it all and come up with an answer. Primarily I'm a human being more than I'm a musician and I'm trying to get back to that state at the moment. I've put too much into this business. I've been involved too much for my own good."

Just the job itself, or the rock'n'roll wildness that goes with it?

"Everything."

He is, I have already been told, dreading the forthcoming American tour.

"I hate touring," he confirms. "I don't get anything out of it whatsoever. I feel terrible because to play every night I have to get drunk so I'll be drunk for six weeks. I just want to step back for a while."

Quite clearly there's a lot on his mind. And he's obviously not joking when he says he wants to think about the past. When I prod him into telling me about it he launches himself almost unstoppably into a stream of memories, some of them not that nice.

"I was born," he begins, "on Jan 4 1956. Just Bernard Sumner. My mother didn't have very much imagination. I was," he says, "very shy and pretty nice. I was the only child. I got spoiled as much as my parent could afford: I got five fish fingers for my tea instead of three."

Parent? Just the one?

"Yeah," he says. "I never had a father. I lived with my grandparents and my mother until I was 12 in a Coronation St terraced house. Then she got married and we moved out to a council house across the way — that was horrible. People chucked bottles out of the windows and I'd wake up in the morning and see used tampax and durexes hanging in front of my window on a tree. That's not very nice. I used to have a motorbike and the petrol would be nicked every night. In the end I wired it up to the mains electricity. I got a high voltage coil out of a lorry and put it through a transformer. I never got it stolen again. I don't know who used to do it but a couple of other kids had bikes nearby so I went round and trashed their bikes one night just in case they'd done it. It made me feel better."

He hung out with two groups of friends — his school friends ("nice") and the local hooligans. The latter were "a bit evil." They enjoyed "kicking dogs in the balls, stealing, breaking into people's cars for a laugh" and so on. Barney would join in, to a greater or lesser extent, and then go home, shut his bedroom door and listen.

"My parents used to argue all the time," he recalls vividly. "When they first got married I used to sit up at night and listen to them shouting at each other — quite disturbing. It was a very weird part of my life. It stopped after a while because they just gave up. That's what people do, isn't it? Just give up...

"It made me think they were horrible. Some of the things they used to say that they thought I couldn't hear..." The pain floods back into his eyes. "I've never liked my mother. She's just horrible to me. Really nasty. I've stopped speaking to her. I haven't seen her for two years. She did something which was unforgiveable about four years ago and she doesn't really exist in my mind now."

As Barney entered his teens he began to worry about what he could do when he left school. Going on the dole was unthinkable — "I'd been brought up believing it was shameful" — and it seemed unlikely he'd have any qualifications to speak of. A job in a supermarket while he was still at school scared him even more — his fellow workers were "the nicest people I've ever worked with in my life but it was so boring that it instilled in my brain that if I ever did anything like that I'd go insane." He felt even worse because he'd taken the job to be able to pay back his grandfather for his scooter. "I never did," he gulps. "I still feel guilty about that to this day." The only talent he did have was at art so he desperately tried to get a job doing graphics at an ad agency — in vain. Somehow his mother got him a £13-a-week job instead — in the treasury doing accounts. That was dreadful: "25-year-old blokes sleeping for an hour at dinner because they're like old men," he remembers with horror. He had to escape.

He did so with surprising resourcefulness. First he borrowed a portfolio from a rather more talented friend, then he applied to every Manchester ad agency in the Yellow Pages. He got two jobs. He then told one of them he had flu and couldn't start for a week, meanwhile trying out the other one. The next week he swapped, told the one he's just worked in he'd got flu and tried the one he'd missed the previous week. At the end of that week he chose the best one. Working on TV commercials, supposedly, but it turned out more like three years of making tea, delivering messages, labelling things and, eventually, painting "film cells". There was one major consolation — he could listen to music all day; Kraftwerk, Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Led Zeppelin whenever Barney controlled the tape recorder. He might have carried on frittering the hours away there if he hadn't gone to see the Sex Pistols one evening with his old schoolfriend, Peter Hook. He claims, like many others, that the experience literally forced him to form a band. He already had a guitar — a sixteenth birthday party from his mother — Peter bought a bass and the two of them bought instrument instruction books. Soon afterwards they roped in a singer who they'd met at concerts — Ian Curtis—and wrote their first song, 'Survivors', rehearsing opposite a steel band in a pub called The Great Western. "It was like The Stooges without any rhythm," Barney chuckles. "It sounded awful. I thought it was wonderful."

After a series of drummers Stephen joined, they wrote a whole set of songs, played them for a year, decided they were all crap, wrote some more and recorded them as the Joy Division LP, 'Unknown Pleasures'. "We were just doing something because we loved it," remembers Barney, going uncharacteristically misty-eyed. "It was for very unselfish reasons. There was no thought of being successful or making money — we just did it because we liked music and wanted to produce something that was good. By that time I had already come to the conclusion that there was nothing else in the world for me."

Which is why there was no question of not carrying on after Ian's death, hard as it was. He recalls their first ever performance afterwards as a three-piece at Manchester's Beach Club. "I knew everyone was looking at me going 'it must be really hard for him'. It was horrible, like breaking a massive sheet of ice. But we had to do it. A bitter pill to swallow and it took a few goes to get it down and we did it."

Indeed they did, but was it worth it? Looking at Barney's worried face today it's sad to realize that this whole music making business is no longer the simple innocent joy it used to be.

GILLIAN GILBERT

Gillian Gilbert laughs nervously, more the shy giggly adolescent girl than the 25-year-old pop star. She's not really used to interviews. She usually sits there with the others saying nothing until finally "they pick on you and say 'Why don't you say much? Is it awful being the girl?". It's so embarrassing."

She insists that the fact she's the only girl is irrelevant and from the time I've spent with New Order that rings true. The real division, if there is one, is between two pairs — her and Stephen (who she lives with) as against Barney and Peter, the more abrasive and dominant couple (beneath which, one suspects, they respect Stephen and Gillian more than anyone else in the world). She is, however, the most recent member, being asked to join back in 1981 a few months after Ian's death and after New Order had already struggled through a couple of hesitant outings as a three-piece. Her only previous experience was some incompetent acoustic guitar strumming on a couple of songs in the group started by her middle sister Kim and a friend, The Inadequates.

At the time she had just passed her first year exams in graphics at Stockport College of Technology. It was Stephen who actually asked her (though he says the idea came from manager Rob Gretton — "definitely not me"). "I was quite shocked," she remembers. "I wanted to join but I thought I couldn't. I was going to say 'no' because I thought my mum and dad wouldn't let me give up college." So she asked them. 'They said 'great, yeah'. They were quite keen'."

By then she'd already had that first brief encounter with music in The Inadequates. A friend of Kim's had written to the local paper complaining that there were no punk bands in Macclesfield and claiming, a little prematurely, that the three of them were forming one. One day the friend rung up in a panic begging the two of them to come round and "make something up quick" — a reporter and photographer had just arrived. The next week they were on the front page. "It was horrible," Gillian recalls. "I went to this posh school. I thought being on the front page confessing to being a punk they'd throw me out."

They didn't but, even though The Inadequates didn't last long, neither did Gillian conform to their standards. Her days of playing hockey ("I was a reserve. Cross sticks! 1 -2-3! Don't repeat any of this!") and having a crush on a certain Liverpool footballer ("I can't say who. It's really awful now. I'll be the laughing stock... it was Emlyn Hughes!") were finishing.

In their place came organising Macclesfield coaches at £2 a time to go and see people like Elvis Costello (who she also fancied) the Stranglers in Manchester, and discovering with a few friends a pet band who no-one else had heard of. A few months previous they had played a rather messy punky thrash and then were called Warsaw. Now they were called Joy Division.

"Nobody else liked them," she remembers. "It sounds corny and stuff but they really did change everything. We used to go and they'd just be five people watching."

When they became "popular" — in other words when 'Unknown Pleasures' LP and the Transmission' single crept up the 'indie' charts — it "lost its appeal a bit" for a while. And then she started going out with Stephen. Nowadays the two of them live together in a modest house in Macclesfield with their Yorkshire Terrier Sammy. "Children?" she laughs, "I worry enough with the dog. "

STEVEN MORRIS

On the wall of New Order's rehearsal studio is a letter from Steven Morris' dad. It's typed on headed paper and is a request, in an awkward distant hectoring tone, for an autographed photo for a friend's daughter. One suspects the photo was never sent. Certainly Steven gives the impression that he and his dad were always rather distant.

"Once I found a baby diary my dad had when my mum had me," he says. "You're supposed to write down what happens. It's only got one entry: 'Steven has got a tooth — we are afraid the neighbours will start talking soon'. I must have had an awfully uneventful infancy. As far as he was concerned anyway."

He's fairly vague about what his father does these days. "He's got an office," he offers, "and he's not home much. He travels even more than me — he told me about a station in Cologne: 'Don't go near the station, that's where all the naughty women hang out'. How would he know? He flogs taps, I think, and toilet seats. He gave me one for Christmas once — very nice it is too, made of wood, sort of, er, renaissance. Pretty useless really though, because I've already got one.

Steven Paul David Morris ("all saints, aren't they? Strange...") plopped into he world at four in the morning just under 29 years ago. "I didn't really have that many friends," he says matter of factly. "I was ill all the time. They never found out what it was — I just used to throw a wobbler every few months and collapse. They thought I might have some mental defect," he laughs, tapping his head, "and spent quite a bit of time investigating that possibility." At the age of 14 he was "suspended indefinitely' from school for "over-indulging in other pursuits".

"I was sniffing glue, drinking cough medicine, that kind of thing," he says. "I daresay if it was today I would have ended up a smack addict. I can see why it appeals but it didn't really get me anywhere but in a lot of trouble. The CID," he recalls, "were called in. It was my own fault. All someone had to do was open my desk — it was full of empty medicine and dry cleaning fluid bottles." A friend was caught and confessed more serious misdemeanours to his parents. "LSD was mentioned," sighs Steven, "and that was it."

His parents, understandably, were distraught. "Major efforts," he remembers, "were put into transforming me into a nice boy'. After strenuous efforts a new school — "like a paramilitary organisation" — was found but Steven escaped at 15 to work at a mill "cutting rolls of cloth and cutting out daisies to adorn ladies underwear". But three months later he ruined his prospects of a life of lingerie by "getting pissed one afternoon". He was sacked. Further disgraced he moved to a squat then gave even that up and moved back home.

"One day I was walking down the street," he recalls, "and this music shop in Macclesfield had this sign in the window saying 'drummer wanted'. I thought 'that's a good idea' — I had some drums because my parents had thought they'd indulge me a bit — 'it'll give him a bit of a hobby; something to bang about'." The ad had been placed by Ian Curtis. Steven went round, was plied with Marlboro cigarettes (he'd supposedly given up) and a four song Warsaw demo. Pretty soon he was in the band. A couple of years later Ian was dead. "You always think afterwards there's something you should have done," he signs, "but there's nothing. Shame though."

And now? Steven lives in harmony of sorts with Gillian ("We throw kitchen equipment but we don't really row") and wonders whether coming home with a member of the band is a good idea after all.

'We don't really have to worry about financial success any more," he explains, "and I'm not really sure that's a good thing. If you've not got something you always want it. When you've got it you've got to find something else. I think I know what I want now — just a quiet life. To be comfortable. How does that sound? Yeah," he sighs, "it does sound a bit like being an accountant, doesn't it?"

PETER HOOK

Peter Hook loves playing games. Especially the 'being awkward during interviews' game. He blocks as many questions as possible (more, one suspects, out of boredom than secrecy) and today, if he does answer, he repeatedly insists that he does so hand-in-hand with me, so that I have to tell him about my childhood, my schooling, my romantic experiences etc. It ends in casual abuse - I call him a pathetic bastard because he's loving this stupidity so much. "No I'm not," he grins. "I'd much rather be having a Kentucky." Bastard...

Bit by bit however he does let slip quite a lot of what has happened since his birth on February 13th 1956. A Friday, one presumes? "Thursday," he sneers with delight. "A lot of people try that one." And what was he like? "I used to frown a lot," he says. "My 16-month-old daughter frowns a lot too funnily enough. Heather Lucille, she's called. Lucille because Little Richard was making a comeback when she was bom." Heather's mother, he digresses, is called Iris and they've been together for eight years. He intimates that she'd like to get married and he wouldn't. "And will I?" he teases. "That depends on what the stakes are."

Peter's parents both worked — his father as an engineer, his mother at the ship canal — and came home to a two-up two-down eventually filled with three boys: Peter, Christopher and Paul. Peter, the oldest, was lazy at school, and naughty out of school. He won't give details of the latter today but the last time we met he and Barney teased each other into admitting misdemeanours like cat burglary and nicking lead off roofs. Whatever the truth he can't have got into too much trouble because when he left at 16 with his one 'O' level (English, grade 6) he got a job at the Town Hall in the law office, subsequently he drifted through jobs as assistant cook at Clacton Butlin's ("I once split 2,500 chickens into four and split 10,000 tomatoes"), a humper in a tea warehouse, a clerk in another law office, this time on the docks before giving up work for the band. All the way through explaining this he hints at untold naughtinesses but won't be explicit. Did he ever really get into trouble with the law?

'That would be telling, wouldn't it?" he grins wickedly.

Indeed it would — which is exactly why I asked.

"But I'm not going to tell you anything, am I?" he chuckles.

And why not?

"Because I don't like seeing it in print," he answers.

Oh. So what does he like seeing in print?

"Samantha Fox."

And so on. We move on to the way he treats audiences. He explains that he has no qualms about hitting members of his audience when they provoke him and isolates "paying", "coming to the concert" and "bugging me" as sufficient provocation. In his world being a celebrity doesn't have many bonuses.

"I get my car kicked in a lot," he complains. "I think that's how people react to 'celebrities' all over the world. Do I think that's fair?" he grins wryly. "Well they've paid for the car so I suppose they may as well kick it in."

He escapes from this unwelcome attention at his half-finished Rochdale house where he also owns a studio with a partner. "I spend a lot of time decorating,' he says. "It's a bit of a shithole really. I built a doorway yesterday. It took me ages. The Membranes were upstairs and I was making more noise than them." When he's not doing his D.I.Y. bit he works in the studio, prepares his motorbike, and does weightlifting every other day "to get rid of the bags round my waist". Then he sleeps — on the left side of the bed with his arm hanging out.

"One night on the Buzzcocks tour in Glasgow," he explains, "I was pissed and I woke up with my arm hanging out the bed and I thought 'that's really weird'. Ever since I haven't been able to sleep without my arm hanging out like that."

Very strange. So what else? He enjoys sex ("Of course I do. Why? Do you fancy some?"), he worries about having "gone over a fence" at 25 or 26 ("you start worrying about everything; it's just the realization that life isn't as blissfully simple as you thought"), he admits to an irresponsible streak ("it makes life interesting — for everybody") and says that what makes him saddest is "thinking about Ian dying."

"It didn't really make me cry, it made me upset," he remembers. "When my cat died I almost shed a tear or two. But I do think about Ian a lot. What a fool. We've had a great time since — he'd really have enjoyed it. That's the one regret. But that's his tough shit, isn't it?"

THE LP BROTHERHOOD

"ft was a bind,' sighs Barney, about the next new Order LP 'Brotherhood'. "When we went into the studio we discovered we only had maybe four songs — and they weren't completely finished - so we had to write the rest in the studio." From the tone of his voice it sounds as if he reckons they didn't make a very good job. If that's what he thinks he's wrong. It's quite possibly their best LP yet, and is certainly a change of tack. Ever since their dour first attempt, 'Movement', the sort of sub-Joy Division everyone feared they might resort to, most of their work (with the odd exception like Thieves Like Us') has been veering towards the brilliantly hypnotic disco that filled 'Low-Life'. 'Brotherhood' is different, full of tunes, new songs and unexpected melodic twists.

"My favourite song," says Barney, "is 'All Day Long'. It's about child beating." His face hardens. "I don't see how anyone can hurt something that's so innocent, something that's blank and hasn't been written on yet. It's the ultimate crime. If curing the culprits didn't work I'd kill them."

The strangest song is undoubtably the closing 'Every Little Counts'. It marches slowly and melodically — a funeral-paced 'Temptation' meets 'Walk On The Wild Side'— and Barney begins to sing "every second counts/when I am with you/though you are a pig.." and then bursts into laughter. He sounds on the verge of hysterics for most of the rest of the song, a cruelly sarcastic pledge of affection — "even though you're stupid/l still follow you".

"I'm laughing," insists Barney, "because the lyrics are so shit. It's funny because it's a rotten lyric and we don't care. It was the tenth song we wrote and I just thought it's not worth me sitting down and doing it properly if I'm not enjoying it. You should have heard the lines we left out. He giggles. "Even though you're dead/l still sleep with you. " As usual most of the song titles (and the album title itself); are a mystery.

"We always have troubles with titles," he explains. He smiles - he knows that years and years of New Order and Joy Division fans' lives have been wasted trying to figure out the significance of each title to each song. "Do you want to know how we do it?" he asks. "We have a sheet of paper in the studio and whenever anyone thinks of a title they write it down. There were loads. One of the album ones was 'Unspeak' I think. At the end of the album everyone puts a tick by the ones they like and the ones with the most ticks get on the LP. A few are taken from the lyrics of course but for the rest it's a rather crude labour-saving device.

"They've always been irrelevant to the songs,"he laughs. "Since Joy Division. Back then we had a sheet on the wall, this poster of all the films this cinema had on that year and we'd pinch one word from one film and another from another. I think The Eternal' was from something called The Eternal Flame. Probably all the Joy Division titles came from there bar about three. I mean we do employ some taste." He points to a calendar on the wall. "You wouldn't call a song Young's Kitchen, would you?"

But they would, and have, called a song 'Bizarre Love Triangle', from a News Of The World story about a "Vicar Caught In Bizarre Love Triangle". Barney has a peculiar theory to explain this strange mixture of perfectionism and last minute indifference. "What I think is important," he explains, "is that your ideas spread in different directions, even rubbish places, because it's all part of where humans are. I mean, I go out on Friday night and get drunk for no apparent reason, just to let myself go, not think about anything and be dumb for a night. And with some songs you take the same attitude. That's the way human life is and our songs should reflect human life. So 'Bizarre Love Triangle' is a Friday night attitude to writing lyrics and singing a song. That's all."