1987 01 New Order IM&RW

POINTS OF ORDER

The album Brotherhood is the latest in New Order‘s long line of commercial but independent successes. Mark Prendergast meets them in Manchester. Pics: George Bodnar

The emergence of New Order as a joyful and dance-orientated force in music from the harrowing demise of Joy Division has been documented well enough to require no repetition. The original four-piece spawned legions of imitators at the tail end of the seventies, but, after a transitional period marked by their first album and couple of singles, the three survivors, Peter Hook, Bernard Albrecht and Steve Morris, augmented by guitarist and keyboard player Gillian Gilbert, reached a commercial plateau significant for both its widespread appeal, and the terms on which it was achieved. The more morose and introspective earlier years were also marked by a refusal to perform interviews, but the move to 'accessibility' signalled by records like Blue Monday, the best selling 12" single of all time, meant that the door was open to a bunch of people who were unaffected and unassuming.

The particular door in my case was that to the basement of the Hacienda, Factory Record's Manchester based nightclub and concert venue, where I spoke to Gillian Gilbert and Steve Morris.

Gillian, when you came into the group the focus shifted to a lighter, fresher sound. Did you influence that change at all? "I don't know exactly what I added because I don't think it ever boils down to just one individual in the group. Everybody contributes. Movement was my first album see and I'd not done it before. I suppose it was hard because it was the first album and producer Martin Hannett was there. That was bit weird, because we tend to produce ourselves now. If you are working under a producer he has the last say in what you do. Martin did not take that much notice anyway and during Movement he was losing interest so we sort of had to do it ourselves in the end. At the time we weren't very happy with the way the record came out.“

What kind of equipment did you start out with?

“We had an ARP Quadra synth which was like a string synth, a polyphonic synth and a lead synth all together. We had a Powertran sequencer which Barney made from a kit, which we used for bass lines, and a drum machine. That was it really, we built on that."

You say that Bernard made synths up from a kit. Were you not into that?

Gillian:

“Yes, but I don't know anything about it then. We were in a situation that meant we were always looking for something new. When we couldn't get it from the latest equipment we would have to build it which Barney usually did. He was really into manuals and kits then. We were very limited at the time but now we know more and have a lot more stuff available to us.“ 

Could you give us a breakdown of the equipment yourself and Gillian use now, Steve?

“Well, an Emulator Two, three Voyetra synths - one‘s auto programmable, one's a manual and one's a spare; two Yamaha QXI sequencers just in case one breaks down and two Yamaha RX II so-called drum machines. Everything is done up to the QXI which has multitrack drive. The Voyetra is a very good synth which is made by Octave Plateau in America. It's a rack mountable thing and very good although it's a bit complicated."

What is it like now using all this equipment? I remember seeing you in 1982 and there were huge gaps between the songs because you were fiddling about with your equipment.

Gillian: “Well I used to do a lot of programming on Prophet 5 sequencers. It's my favourite piece of equipment because it just has a simple panel all set out in front of you whereas the Voyetra has multi-function buttons. The drawbacks of the Prophets were that they were very unreliable and not good on the road. We used to have four of them but they got banged about so much on the road that now we use the Voyetra for tours. A roadie does all the programming now. On stage we have five or six floppy disks for the sequencers and more floppy discs for the Emulator. We program them and after each song we juggle the disks around. These floppy discs are really good. Back in '82 we had a lot of trouble with loading sequencers 'cos we used mini-cassettes and they would overheat and everything. lt was a disaster. We would play a song or a couple of songs and then bang! something would go wrong."

What are the biggest differences between recording in the studio and reproducing the material live?

Steve: "Well, you can have a lot more time in the studio than you have doing it live even though recording is still a compromise of sorts. The thing is, we have to program the synths, and because we play a different set every night we have to cart around a lot of equipment and programmes and spares and make sure they all still work. I'm surprised how many of the Voyetra programmes actually get muddled or wiped last thing at night. We hold bets that something will go wrong. What it does is that it has 99 programmes on it. You load it and it counts from 1 to 99 and when you get to 97/98 it stops dead and says error. You then have to go back and start all over again. It's old technology really. The disk drives that we use in most things are archaic really - it's just 8-track technology but ‘a disk drive is better than a cassette dump!"

The unreliability of most state-of-the-art equipment is a recurrent subject with this group, but it also has its advantages. The best known, example of this is Blue Monday's instantly-recognisable bass-drum pattern which came about largely due to the Oberheim DMX's programming eccentricities. The commercial success of that single was echoed by the response to Power, Corruption and Lies, which was their most successful album to date.

Steve: “We had no intentions to make that album the album so to speak. We never do that. We just went in and pulled out the last bunch of songs we'd written. It was recorded in Britannia Row Manchester in 4 or 5 weeks. It took 8 weeks altogether with mixing and editing. it went quite quickly and we were producing it ourselves. We were really getting down to production at this stage. The John Peel sessions that have just been released contain two tracks from Power, Corruption and Lies but the sound is quite bare. You see when we did that it was the second or third time in the studio without a producer and we just decided to do those four songs in a day. They let us into Revolution Studios in Cheedle. 5-8-6 was written with the original Mickey Mouse drum machine and sequencer but by the time we got to Power, Corruption and Lies we got a DMX and a Polysequencer so it sort of beefed itself up a bit. We got much better sounds. We used a Moog on the bass sounds and a Prophet I sequencer.“

Do you produce your records in a certain way?

Steve: “It's a fairly strange area. I never quite sorted it out or figured out what it was. The synth stuff is pre-done so there isn't much you can do with it. We have a bit of EQ and a bit of this and that. We rarely put effects on the stuff, maybe a bit of reverb. Production for us is what we put down and then what we strip away. The problem with synths is that they get cloudy - they can sound really weedy or they can get to sound like mush."
 

What are your favourite studios?

Gillian: "Jam in London and Yellow Two in Stockport. I like those because they have a lot of space and a lot of rooms to get away from the control room. It‘s not good to be in there all the time, your ears start to go. If you can get away you can give your ears a cleanout.'

Steve: "Britannia Row used to be really good. It had a big ambient room which was a games room really and we ended up recording in there most of the time because of the sound, but now they've made it all high-tech, yeuch! Most of the time we try and play as a band live in the studio with just a guide bass or drum to give it shape. We do this on the ‘acoustic‘ numbers. I like a nice atmosphere and so do the rest of the band. A lot of these studios have no character and we're not very comfortable in them. I've never gone for playing 'click-tracking' - just poi poi poi to a metronome in your headphones so it's perfectly in time behind some big screen. Martin Hannett was really into that when we were in Joy Division. It would drive you mad. It's better playing against people but it's obviously difficult when you're doing a sequencer song."

Low-Life was New Order's second self-produced album, and continued in the tradition of the band's alternative but commercial sound. Even so, they still hadn't committed themselves to a standard approach to each song.

Steve: "For that album each song was approached in a different way. With Love Vigilantes we came up with the music first. The riffs, bass line, drums, melody and guitar part. We had a basic verse/chorus combination in musical terms. We went into the studio and Barney said 'I've written some lyrics.‘ We had never heard them. We didn't know what on earth it was about. So we set up live - Barney was doing guide vocals and guitar, Gillian played the bass/synth and Hookey his sliding lead bass. We just did it and it came out in the first take, really great, very simple but it's hard to get something that good so quickly. The Perfect Kiss took decades to write. With sequencer songs like that you always end up with bits and pieces, like three bits when you need four, or two when you need three. You just get lost in it and you spend months finding bits and pieces just to end up scrapping the lot. There are even sampled frogs on that. That song took a long time to make.“ 

Gillian: "With Low-Life like everything else I play strings, add effects, play keyboards or play over the top of the Emulator. On Love Vigilantes I did the bass/synth. On stage when we do this I play guitar and program the equipment to do the bass/synth part because Barney has to sing and he can't play and sing very well. It was Barney who started with the synths, now I work on them doing bits and bobs here and there. Still, Elegia, the instrumental on Low-Life was written by Barney on a synth."

Your new album Brotherhood has just been released. Was it a different experience to your previous work?

Steve: "With Brotherhood we had four songs that we'd written and we went into the studio and wrote the rest there. It took 15 weeks in all to do the record which is a long time for us. The longer you spend in the studio the more you can refine the music until you refine the life out of it. One thing we discovered for that album was this Roland SPX Sync Box where you can just put down a live drum track and you can use that to clock sequences.“ 

Gillian: “We finished it very quickly, in nine weeks for that matter, the recording I mean. We wanted to get it out of the way. I know that this might sound like a funny attitude but it's true. We also did some soundtrack work recently for an American film called Salvation. We did three instrumentals and one vocal. We fancied doing it for a long time so when we got the opportunity we just went for it.“ 

New Order have arrived in the mainstream world of the big commercial sea of the rock music business. Over the last three years they have travelled the globe and are just revving up for another large tour of the United States. Their approach to touring has appeared ambivalent over the years, varying between refusals to perform encores and crowd-pleasing performances where Barney takes his shirt off. It seemed relevant to ask how the band actually felt about touring: 

Steve: “We've always enjoyed our concerts in Ireland. Japan was strange, it was so different. When you go over there you realise that they've got a way of doing things which precludes your way, which they are not very much interested in. One person cannot decide over it, they have to have conferences. It was in 1985 and it was a bit of an ordeal. We had two weeks in April where we had to do four gigs - two in Tokyo, in Osaka and another one in Tokyo. As well as that we had to write two songs, edit a video and mix the sound for a video for our Japanese distributor Nippon Columbia. We also had to do loads of interviews plus equipment extravaganzas for Yamaha. We had this girl who designed the RX II drum machine for Yamaha and it was very very difficult to communicate even with an interpreter. We were also quite ill because we had caught some vicious bug in Hong Kong the week before. We've also been to Australia, New Zealand, San Giovanni in Italy where we played a village square, Poland where we are very big and Berlin loads of times. We've played America a few times and I really like Atlanta, Texas and New Orleans. The Americans love to come up at the end of a gig and ask us what our lyrics are about. Joy Division appealed to a white male audience but New Order now have a cross section of the US population. In Washington. the Go-Go capital of the world, black people are really into us.

Of course we like playing at home but the problem with the Hacienda club is that it's a bit far and a lot of people from outside cannot go."

To get back to equipment, do you use computers at all in your work?

Steve: "Well on Blue Monday and Power, Corruption and Lies we used an Apple Computer - well, a speech synthesiser. We spent days and days trying to get a computer voice out of the Apple for Blue Monday. We eventually put it on tape and later our engineer was playing it back and we asked where the voice pattern was that we had put on from the Apple. He said he had wiped it by accident. We didn't bother to do it again. We said fuck it and added on a bit of vocals.“ 

Do you use any computer sequencing apart from dedicated Hardware?

Steve: "Well we use a QXI Yamaha sequencer which includes dedicated software. With computers you have a bit too much to lug about. Andy Robinson our keyboard roadie would like a computer. He can program the QXI which has the amazing ability of being able to shift back and forward in time. He uses a Steinberg sequencer to work things out on. Vince Clarke uses one of these. You have to have a monitor with it and if it goes wrong it's a pain. Interface computers are not designed to be bumped around. As far as programming goes Andy does all that. We have a Roland MSQ 800 MIDI Sequencer which is easy to program. Andy can feed this into the QXI  We can easily edit it in there. The problem with the Roland is that it cannot edit but once it‘s in it‘s great. With the QXI you have to be very musical -give what you are putting in a name and a time signature. With the Roland you just bang it in like a Walkman. If I had the time I would work on a MIDI splicing device which could combine the gate duration from a drum machine with the pitch info from a synth. You can‘t do that but if you could you'd have automatic music. It's a flight of fancy really and not very useful for mankind.“

Finally are there any particular producers that you'd like to work with? What individual musicians would you say you've been influenced by?

Gillian: "Iggy Pop's new album is good. I've always liked The Buzzcocks, Echo and the Bunnymen and of course David Bowie. I'd love David Bowie to produce us.

Steve: “Well as far as producers go I like Phil Spector, Adrian Sherwood and Bill Laswell. My favourite musicians are the two drummers Jaki Liebezeit from Can and Art Tripp who was on Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and in the Magic Band. They are my all time favourite drummers - and I suppose we all owe a debt to John Bonham...“

 Mark Prendergast