1989 02 04 NME New Order Feature

"LET'S FACE IT, BIRDS ARE THE DRIVING FORCE...”

NEW ORDER DENY EVERYTHING
(Part Two) Can this blunt ejaculation by NEW ORDER'S Barney really explain the impetus behind the planet's most popular cult? Drunk on 'Technique' and Mao Tse-Tung’s best bitter, DANNY KELLY and the fantastic four consider confusion, imitation, television and motivation.
Pictures: LAWRENCE WATSON.

Our story so far: to avoid being interviewed in Buenos Aires, the erratically brilliant, brilliantly  erratic pop group New Order have financed a military coup in Argentina. Undeterred, the intrepid journalist has trailed them to a classy Chinese eaterie in a part of Manchester where armed-force insurrection is proscribed in local by-laws

Here New Order continue to treat all questions with their habitual mixture of Peter Hook's ebullient certainties, Bernard "Barney' Summer's knowing, mischievious mock-caution, and Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Moms' polite evasiveness.

The journalist, buoyed up by several cans of Cantonese beer, is not though, to be put off. He ploughs on because of all the things that New Order’s music has meant in his life. And he ploughs on because right now his head is aswirl, full of fluttering luminous butterflies. These, he believes, have been put there by the band's new LP, ‘Technique'; New Order rate continuous exposure to Chinese lager as a far more likely explanation.

Now read on (dot dot dot)

NEW Order is no longer quite so New. The band have already spanned the coming, and going, of three Soviet presidents, four national newspapers, countless English cricket captains, six Smiths albums and the Sinclair C5.

Across eight and a half years of unremitting flux, one of life's few reliable constants has been Peter Hook’s beard. I ask the owner of the familiar fuzz how much New Order - the rest of New Order - has changed in that time?

“I honestly don't know; I'm too close. When you consider the period of time involved - what is it now, ten years? - you think 'bleedin' hell it should have changed a lot', but it hasn't. Not that much anyway.”

Yet there’s an undeniable chasm between the guitar-fettered undertaker rock of their ‘Ceremony’ debut and the pushbutton dance pulse of last month’s ‘Fine Time’. To the outsider that transition was made possible by the quantum leap New Order achieved between the wistful beauty of their third single, 'Temptation’ and the bared-wires brutality of its equally classic successor, 'Blue Monday’. From inside the process, though, things appear differently.

Peter Hook is shaking his head: “I don't understand that. ‘Blue Monday' wasn't a great leap forward. People said that it was, and still do, but it isn't true. Saleswise it was, but it didn't make any big difference to us."

“A lot of people," Barney adds, “said it didn't sound like New Order which to me was a great confidence boost, it showed we could get out of a rut and do other things that would still be good. It’s dead easy to find a way of doing something effectively in life and then stick to it for the rest of your days. But that way you never learn anything, and in the end it suffocates you.”

This determination to avoid ‘suffocation’, by resisting familiar routes, is one of New Order's greatest strengths. It's also their biggest weakness, propelling them recklessly along paths that turn out to be sidings, backwaters and cul-de-sacs, places where Now Order finish with half-cooked egg on their mush.

The follow-up to ‘Blue Monday' was a perfect example of one such misadventure. Unfocussed, half-based and cluttered with gratuitous modernity, ‘Confusion’ was slovenly proof of just how fallible they are.

“Yet in a way,” Barney recalls "'Confusion' was a very brave move. We could've easily done ‘Blue Monday Pt 2', 'Blue Tuesday'; instead we did something that was quite experimental.

"We didn’t spend enough time on it. We were all sick of New York when we were doing it, all just wanting to get it done and go home. Plus we didn't know Arthur Baker so neither side was aware of the others' work methods. There was a lot of tension....

"At that time we used to play hours and hours of riffs, then pick 30 seconds and make it into a song, whereas he would start with the chorus and title of a song...."

“So he thought," Hook pipes up grinning, “that we'd jam and then pick the best bits and work on them... and we thought we'd jam and he’d select the best bits. So when we presented him with about 12 hours of unedited tape, he nearly had a bleedin' heart attack!”

So did I the first time I clapped ears on the mish-mashed musical muesli that was ‘Confusion’..

Unreliable though they undoubtedly are, New Order must be doing something right; their career is managing the rare win double of endless critical approval and ever mounting sales. They are that most fortunate of contradictions, the massively popular cult.

But there’s a strange side to this too. New Order’s combination of maximum grooviosity and floggability has assured them fame, love and money, all the trappings usually associated with acts of their standing. Except one...

I'm certain I’m not imagining this; New Order don't seem to have generated the battalions of imitators you'd expect to find in their slipstream, don't appear to be influential. Why don't I ever hear the New Order Sound?

“Oh, I dunno," drawls Hook, "The Cure have had several good goes at it."

Like the Life Of Brian zealots conceding the viaducts, I'll accept The Cure as the starter for ten. But who else? The ensuing silence is broken not by a name but by Barney looking on the bright side:

"I think this situation's quite good, though, compared to what happened with Joy Division. I used to get sick of people ripping them off and very sick of people talking about 'Joy Division bands’.”

And Stephen Morris can't casually accept that he's drummer with The World's Most Completely Ignored Group:

"Maybe New Order haven’t been that influential, but ‘Blue Monday' certainly has. You hear it everywhere, in every record Phil Waterman's done since Dead Or Alive for a start. Just the drum sound, just a tiny bit of New Order, but it's on all his records."

Almost too obvious to mention really, but maybe the reason for this apparent dearth of would-be New(er) Orders is that the original is just an exceptionally tough act to imitate. Not in the musical sense (even the Pet Shop Boys can manage that!), but in the way they conduct themselves, what they actually are...

Namely, the completely autonomous, self-contained, auto-reliant creative cell that musicians always start whining about when they've had a few. New Order have made that dream a reality. They can, and do, please themselves.

They are hermetically sealed, from the tribulations that beset other bands, by the Factory organisation and their own self confidence. Their continued residence in Manchester looks like another crucial element in their unique chemistry. And why do they stay? Is it, as every glimpse of Happy Mondays suggests, the quality of the local drugs?

"It’s just been a way of staying comfortable," reckons Hook, rudely ignoring my question, "of avoiding upsets, allowing you to get on with what you do. By staying where you know, and where your family is, you just avoid all the upset of moving away. Anyway, it's very artificial to just get up and leave your families behind.

“And there's never been any real need, band-wise, to move. Because we work on a scale peculiar to us, and 'cos we've never really craved massive overnight success, we've always been happy to just get on with it, and Manchester has allowed us to do just that."

Is there also a perfectly understandable hint of snook-cocking in their attitude, a delight in the sheer fact of succeeding away from London? Peter Hook is adamant:

“Nah... I think the whole ‘London’ think is vastly overrated, a load of bollocks. That's just the easy way out; to go to the music business..."

“And anyway," injects Barney, "we don't work for ‘the music business'. We work for Factory, which really means ourselves. That's all meant that we've had it a lot easier than most groups."

“That’s definitely true," confirms Hook before hinting at yet another reason why New Order, a law unto themselves, are in a league of their own.

“We haven't had our arses kicked by anyone, ever. There're times when we could probably do with kicking our own arses... But we don’t..."

Despite over three decades of frantic procreative activity you can count the great moments spawned by the marriage of Pop and TV on the fingers of very few hands. Hendrix wigging out on The Lulu Show... the cocksure Jagger being quizzed by William Rees Mogg... The Who pressing ‘Destruct’ on Top Of The Pops... Johnny Rotten (and beer cans) on Juke Box Jury... PIL Careering on Whistle Test... Tom Jones leather-armoured libido on The Last Resort... a few others. Last month, however, an unforgettable vision was added to that paltry list.

If you missed New Order's ‘performance’ on Top Of The Pops, kill to obtain a recording. With good behaviour, you’ll only serve seven or eight years - it's easily worth it!

And when you're released, feast your eyes on TV history, a band achieving the impossible by defying the fixed-grin ’n’ boob tube sterility of that programme and being themselves. Themselves at their very strangest...

Chill to Hooky's arms-folded Genghis Khan stare of inscrutable detatchment!... Thrill to Barney’s fluorescent sacking clothes and his stoned-Bendy-toy Acid dance. .. Stare in blank disbelief as he honours the ludicrous growly bits of ‘Fine Time' with The Silliest Mime Ever Seen On TOTP!... Catch the nerves, the front, the contempt, the incredulity and the panic.

It was four priceless minutes at that magic place where ‘pathetic shambles’ meets with ‘creative chaos'; it was 240 seconds of pure undiluted attitude; it was fantastic TV, almost literally.

The band themselves are a little wary of my breathless enthusiasm. Peter Hook frowns knowingly: "Why exactly do you feel we have to talk about that?"

Because it was the best TOTP slot ever. People were buzzing about it for days afterwards, still are. Surely you were swamped with feedback?

“OK, I'll admit that people have asked us about it,” Hook concedes: “Mostly ‘What were you on?’

“Most bands that get on Top Of The Pops are giving it the full treatment, the full Nick Heyward number, aren't they? Whereas we, who don't know what we're doing, come across like, well, like people who don't know what they’re doing."

Come off it, Peter! You, for one, knew exactly what you were doing; you were being a Rock God! Nothing less! Our very best full-leather-trousers Rock God! The Zodiacs, Eldridges and Husseys of this world cower before you.

“Thanks very much. That's the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

Nice nothing! I'm deadly serious.

And Barney, for his part, did a passable impression of a melting mantis as he ‘danced’ in the style previously only risked in public by the parallel life-form that is Happy Mondays' Bez.

"I go out with Bez a lot and. fair enough, I give him full credit for my dancing. He is," concludes the singer, picking his words with commendable care, "a very influential lad."

You had to stop the choreography to do the "love technique’ growly bits.

“ ‘Growly’? ‘Growly!? I beg your pardon, but I don't do ‘growly' - those are the sexy bits! Haven't you ever heard a Barry White LP?”

Peter Hook drags the conversation round before we discover that New Order are Boney M fans.

"It's the risk-taking thing again. People are bound to remember it a lot more if the sound was bad or if you looked pathetic... People say ’New Order? They were f---ing diabilocal. Think I’ll go and see them’."

Not sure about that, but what NO’s bizarre telly triangle did seriously highlight was how hopeless and tiny and sad most bands end up looking on Top Of The Pops. And how readily they co-operate in their own humiliation.

Peter takes the point and, without a hint of complacency, throws a there-but-for-the-hand-of-god shrug.

"A lot of bands co-operate because they think it’s the only way they can survive. We know it's not the only way we’ll survive... So it was cool for us to flaunt those rules. A lot of bands, to be fair, have a lot of pressure on them, don't have that choice...

"That's why we pick neutral titles for our LPs.."

New Order are trying hard to stop me reading too much into the title of their new LP (the first non-compilation since 'Brotherhood' over two years ago). But ‘Technique' is a far from neutral word: musicians often use it as the opposite of ‘emotion'.

"That's just your personal interpretation. The word 'Technique’ is not descriptive of the album.."

" ‘Technique* is just a way of doing things. We've got our ways - others have theirs..."

In the techniqual jargon of the joumo trade, the interview has arrived at The Difficult Bit. There are many artists who just lurv to talk about their new LP; New Order, given the choice, would opt for primitive dental surgery.

For the first time, I’m made to feel like an outsider, an intruder. My admittedly excited observations on, and enquiries about the LP are being neutralised, either by sudden bouts of speech-loss in the NO rants or by the straightforward ‘no-you're-wrong' theory-terminator. Like I said, these people don't want to talk about 'Technique'.

My head, though, is a tumble-dryer of hunches, tip-offs, guesses and questions. 'Technique’ has got to me, and I must talk about it.

So I've come up with a radical solution to the impasses: I'll tell you now, upfront, that New Order disagree with or deny almost everything put forward below. Then, with that proviso in mind, I'll get on with prattling about the record. Got that? OK, here goes..

It's hardly a surprise to find lavish praise for New Order in the NME, but I'm no kneejerk fan of the band. With their recorded output, indeed, I've been becoming increasingly estranged. 'Lowlife', after all, was nearly four years ago, ‘Brotherhood' was largely rubbish and since 1985's 'Thieves Like Us‘ their singles, with the gorgeous exception of 'Touched By The Hand Of God’ have been erratically lacklustre.

That said, however, I feel compelled to inform anyone who gives a toss that 'Technique' is a wonderment, less a record than an act of enchantment.

'Fine Time' is the sore thumb, isolated in its drab ordinariness by the shimmering beauty that surrounds it. The rest is a remarkably unified swirl of soft yet vigorous melodic rock, crystal sprays of guitar underpinned by That Bass.

Accusations that 'Technique' is a retreat into trad rock hold some water, but we're travelling stellar years from the dreary revisionism of ‘Rattle And Hum’. New Order's patented percussion is still very much present and correct but the mood is often gentle, dappled with melancholy.

Sonically, 'Technique' is related to ‘Lowlife’, the polar opposite of ‘Power Corruption And Lies’. It is, simply, a lovely record.

There's intrigue here too, because 'Technique' could in some ways easily pass for Bernard Summer's solo debut. The incidental fact that he, like Costello and Weller, has become a real singer through sheer practice serves only to highlight lyrics that are afforded a focus in the mix not previously obvious in New Order's work. And those words (for the first time, all by Barney) are more direct and and emotionally charged than before as well.

A tentative suggestion that much of the lyrical content reflects on the turbulence in Barney's past that led, some while ago, to separation from his wife, is met with silent shakes of his head.

Are we to believe then, I press on, that lines like "it takes years to find the nerve to be apart from what you've done / to find the truth inside yourself and not depend on anyone" (my fave from 'All The Way, but there are tons of examples) is devoid of personal significance, something that just came to him while watching Neighbours?

After a short eternity, Barney's face splits into a gleeful beam. He's found an answer for me, it's obvious, and it's one with which he's pleased, one which will bring my probing, and his squirming, to a swift conclusion. From the very pits of his soul he offers:

"Let's face it, birds are the driving force..."

Is that it? Is that really how you want a large part of your input into 'Technique' (a record that damn near makes me cry) to be viewed?

“Erm... yeah, 'birds are the driving force’. . that sounds fine"

Barney‘s ploy works. My attempts at sixth-form psychology collapse in the cackle of shared laughter. But his studied, defensive casualness cannot change the way I respond to 'Technique'. For now at least, it has taken me over, I am full of it.

In a wider context, it will come to be seen, along with its dark reverse side, 'Power Corruption And Lies' as half of a towering twin testament to New Order's quirky occasional, greatness, and will see them safely, vibrantly into the '90s.

Not bad for a record made in Ibiza, eh? ... Not bad for a work motivated by 'birds'...  Not bad for a band that's never even had its arse kicked...