Paul Morley NME Interview

MANCS UNITED

• EX-NME stalwart, media-mouth and ‘business molester’ PAUL MORLEY has an opinion about most things - including NEW ORDER whose soap-like historical documentary, neworderstory, broadcast this weekend, he scripted. DELE FADELE shares a beer and a pop music theory with him.

THE SUAVE, debonair Paul Morley is putting across his public face - as opposed to private
thoughts - over French beers in Soho. By turns animated and pensive, he’s debunking myths about
his legendary self-absorption and talking sense a mile a minute about the New Order South Bank
Show documentary, neworderstory (Sunday, ITV, times vary), he’s just written and produced with
able help from director Kevin Hewitt (whose other credits include filming The Clash).

Legend has it (unfairly) that former NME journalist Paul Morley lost the paper 100,000 readers in the early ’80s because of his self-obsessed obtuse writing; and that he’s had adventures in the grinning rictus of the music business as a kind of ‘molester’ for ZTT records. Now he’s a post-modem TV personality. Typically for a man who believes in ideas and imagination, his latest venture aims to shake up the congratulatory vacuousness of the normal ‘rockumentary’ by playing around with form and format.

“I tried to do it in the style of the great traditional British documentaries like Arena: My Way where you’ve got myriad things happening at once,” he explains. “We kind of mixed it up. At the base of it we have the standard procedure, journalistically telling the story of a pop group. So we have the band interviewed individually and we have all the great characters in this soap opera interviewed: Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, Quincy Jones, John Barnes, Neil Tennant, Bono.

“We also have other themes running through, like a quiz show with New Order as the contestants
and Keith Allen as the quizmaster. And there’s Keith as a Donahue-style figure wandering through an audience investigating the rise and fall of Factory Records.”

The still-acute, media-unfriendly Paul Morley admits to perverseness on his part when questioned
about the show’s conflicting scheduling with New Order’s Reading headline spot; he says not
everyone who is interested in the Mancunian innovators will be at the gig (potential viewing
figures will be in the millions, there’ll be a repeat and a long-form video). He’s also adamant that
New Order are not at the end of their life-cycle as they’ve probably split up every year for 15 years.
But what has drawn him, like a wasp to amber, towards this most wayward of groups?

“Who are my favourite group? New Order. There’s beauty there and it came out of itself. A lot of music seems to come out of the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s but what I like about New Order is they came out of the late ’70s, early ’80s. It was a new start for music. I also like the idea that no-one really has any idea how it’s done. There’s an essence of how pop music should be made, marketed, dreamt up, bought... and New Order are the essence of that.” 

Television in itself seems to be a reductive medium, making the world palatable in bite-sized chunks, distorting and affecting reality, making people act unlike their ‘real’ selves. Doesn’t neworderstory get swallowed up in the mire?

“TV only shrinks the world because people haven’t worked out how to use it yet. In one way we’re reducing 15 years into 51 minutes, but in another sense you can imply and suggest and prompt the imagination so much. If you’re paying attention and watching and listening, it’s a blueprint for the imagination to take over.”

Paul Morley regrets that no music journalist has picked up the baton of extreme writing passed on by him and Ian Penman in 1983, but he’ll still write if you ask him nicely. For now, though, he enjoys being less famous as a teleface. And he still likes New Order after working with them.