2001 08 27 The Big Issue New Order Feature

WORKING CLASS CLASSICS

They may be one of the most influential bands of all time, but New Order still have to graft to earn a living. Newsnight presenter Jeremy Vine - who was once a teenage fan - finds out why

She sits, she pants, she licks her lips. She jumps up and down as New Order's bassist thumbs an opening bar of their classic Atmosphere. But when the band launch into the funkiest number from their new album, she flounces off the stage and barks at them.

Not that Mia, the bass player's cocker spaniel, is any guide to the difference between the music then and now. After so many hours in rehearsal, camped a metre from the amps, the poor animal is probably stone-deaf anyway. But her choosiness says something about the market New Order is resurfacing into: being the sacred remnant of the even more sacred Joy Division doesn't count for much in the land of Boyzone and Atomic Kitten. Make the wrong move, you're dogfood.

So when I arrive to see them preparing for their secret gig at the Olympia in Liverpool one of the producers is worrying as loudly as the soundcheck.

"Warner wanted an all-singing, all-dancing video of Crystal [the new single], and of course the band said that's not their style. So they had cute young boys mime it," she tells me, “but trouble is, the kids now think that's New Order. So the second they walk out to do Top Of The Pops a nation of teenagers will be absolutely gutted."

Well, the suits in marketing can fret about that. New Order might not mind gutting a nation of teenagers - Joy Division positively prided themselves on doing it, their despairing frontman Ian Curtis somehow managing to be manic and imperious at the same time. In 1980, on the brink of stardom and only a day before the band was due to embark on a sell-out American tour, he hanged himself.

Today the line-up's one concession to youth is Phil Cunningham, 26 and grinning all the time (you’re allowed to these days), whooshed from indie obscurity with the Macclesfield band Marion to stand in for Gillian Gilbert on keyboards. Which, I guess, explains the width of the smile.

Gillian, married to drummer Steven Morris, has had to stay at home to nurse their young daughter Grace, who is unwell. A reminder of the blindingly obvious - we're all older than we used to be. Also here is Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins, firing accurate guitar chords around the hall and slightly less accurate gobs of phlegm. I'm pathetically impressed; the floor managers have stopped letting us do that on Newsnight.

After which it gets familiar. Bernard Sumner is singing, as always with the trademark jumpiness of a bank teller who reckons the next customer in line might have a weapon in his jacket. Peter Hook plays bass - the old order. He's looked the same for 20 years. Now they strike up Love Will Tear Us Apart, and I’m catapulted back to my teenage bedroom.

Bedroom? Yep, right back two decades, right down to the curtains and the colour of the carpet; the pet gerbil scuttling on its wheel, discarded jeans, sixth-form angst, a Theatre of Hate poster and above all, this song revolving on the record player, what, how many times? A hundred, five hundred? A thousand love will tear us aparts? Now the song is personal, an exclusive - it’s mine, there’s nobody else watching, the roadies wear ear-plugs and the spaniel has gone - and it is exhilarating, truly uplifting; a revelation beyond any political scoop or Old Bailey verdict.

Actually, it is a scoop of sorts. New Order have gone years without playing Joy Division songs in public. Quick, ring the newsdesk.

Uplifting - but chilling too. The bleak Curtis question: ‘Why is the bedroom so cold/You've turned away on your side' lays bare the emotional asphyxiation which made him suddenly write himself out of the script, leaving his fellow musicians bereft and, as Steven Morris tells me, more confused about the motivations for his suicide than any of their fans were.

“Most of the time we couldn't hear what Ian was saying in those songs. He'd come to rehearsals with a book, you'd be playing, and he'd just turn to a page in the book and start singing.” says Morris, half-smiling, embarrassed. "So we never saw the words in black and white. It was kind of like afterwards, after he died, we had to listen to all the tapes and write down what the words were. That was when it hit us. It was like a suicide note.”

The longest suicide note in music history? Morris’ account would sound a shade Spinal Tap if only the subject were less disastrous. The death was almost a killer blow for the rest of the group. They went ahead with their American tour, without Curtis - and without insurance, which hardly mattered until they had all their equipment stolen from a rented van in New York. Directionless, singerless, gearless, they arrived at a police station to report the theft.

"We went down there en masse, this American precinct 13 or whatever it was,” Sumner has recalled. "And there was this copper with a big ghetto-blaster playing Chic's Good Times and he was dancing to it, and we’d just had $47,000-worth of equipment stolen, and he turned round to us and 'You'll wait ’til the fucking record finishes,’ We realised what a great party town New York was.”

The music changed, partly fed by those impressions and partly by Olympic-level drug consumption, and the shift helped New Order hit on the biggest selling 12-inch single of all time, the unique Blue Monday, whose opening gambit ‘How does it feel/To treat me like you do’ always sounded to me like a subversive echo, a victim’s version, of Elvis Presley’s ‘Maybe I didn't treat you/Quite as good as I should have’.

A string of albums delighted the critics - Low Life, Substance, Brotherhood, Technique, Republic - but when it came to money the group seemed to have (in a phrase John Smith once used of John Major) the non-Midas touch.

They blew a fortune on the Hacienda nightclub in Manchester then watched as their record label Factory went up in smoke; adolescent rows led to serial splits. The sleeve for Blue Monday was so clever that (unbelievably) it cost more to manufacture than they sold the record for. Even Elvis never managed that.

"So I’m not a millionaire," is Peter Hook’s bottom line when we meet in a restaurant after the five-hour run-through. "For me this is about security. I do have to work. I’ve just worked for a year-and-a-half without being paid, putting this album together - we don’t get paid until we deliver. If you have to do it, you have to be good. It keeps you sprightly."

He has found the perfect adjective for the new album: ’sprightly’ is exactly what Get Ready is - lively, danceable, loud, even cocky; but definitely sprightly. Sprightly is what you get when rockers of a certain age beat the living daylights out of their instruments to show they’re still contenders. Sprightly is what you have to be when you relaunch in a market full of prepubescent pap.

"The boy/girl band thing has happened and it's all synthetic pop,” Morris says. "I wouldn't give it time of day.”

But sprightliness does not sit easily alongside the brooding melancholia that is spliced into New Order’s DNA - and when, on the standout Turn My Way, Sumner sings, ‘The wide expanse/The wheel of chance/Will turn my way/The sky will not be grey,’ you can’t believe, after 21 years with his head in his hands, he's suddenly come over all Club Tropicana.

Over dinner he explains.“I only wrote those lines because they rhymed," which makes me wonder if I’ve spent too much time listening for moments of revelation. The bouncy Rock The Shack sounds just like its title, and is frustrating uncomplicated for a group which has been coining its complexes these past two decades.

Yet Get Ready works a treat - getting better with every listen, partly because the secret chemistry of guitar, voice and bass is so powerfully evocative of everything New Order has ever done before, and partly thanks to Sumner and Hook's enduring ear for a gripping melody. Oh, and also because Bernard could sing his way through the Yellow Pages and make it sound alarming.

Listen closely and ‘We're having the time of our lives/We’re lost in a cruel paradise’ from Someone Like You sounds like the disc's coda. The new, sprightly New Order may be telling us they’re in this for money and fun, but at heart the band is as edgy as ever. Even the brashest dance tracks are as nervy, jittery, and satisfying as anything they’ve done.

Which means Hooky’s spaniel has got it wrong, what with her regular flouncings. Hooky certainly reckons so.

“I think the album is fucking great,” he says objectively. “Punky, fresh, it makes me feel young again. We’re not classed as a revival band. We’ve been lucky to escape that.”

I didn’t think I was going to like Hooky - watching him ask Billy Corgan “Haven’t you learnt to sing near the mic yet?" I decided he is exactly the sort of person who would have stolen my sweet money at school - but when we start talking, 20 minutes go by in a flash. We discuss favourite Roxy Music basslines and his marriage to Caroline Aherne (Mrs Merton, Denise Royle etc). “She’s a very strange woman and I don’t think she’ll ever find what she’s looking for,” he says.

We touch on the residual sadness over Curtis, whom he feels would nowadays have got proper medical attention for his depression, and even his views on the single currency: "The peseta is going to disappear and they’re the things that make your holiday special - in that case, yes I am a Eurosceptic. ”

When I switch the tape off he says, "Is that it? I was enjoying that. You sound like a fan.” And I thought, that’s torn it, that’s my cover blown; I was going to wait ’til the very end before I told them.

Get Ready is out now on Warner.