2014 11 New Order, Uncut

"Are you a good person, or are you a twat?"

That's how you should judge people, says BERNARD SUMNER. Whether in JOY DIVISION or the returning NEW ORDER, he's dealt with both kinds. Now the author of a memoir, Bernard meets Uncut to discuss Ian Curtis, scooters, Wishbone Ash, and pointedly, his former colleague Peter Hook. "He likes the attention," says Bernard, "I think he resented the fact he wasn't the singer in New Order".

Story: John Robinson | Photograph: Sheila Rock

BERNARD SUMNER MEETS Uncut wearing the all-purpose attire of the downtime celebrity: nondescript baseball cap, dark glasses, neither of which he removes. He drives a black Mercedes sports car - as it turns out, at considerable speed, allowing his passenger to experience the picturesque environs of this semi-rural, footballery part of Cheshire as a rapid montage of looming, ivy-covered walls, concealed entrances and tight turns. The white-knuckle journey to a suitably quiet and interview-friendly pub is made additionally piquant by the driver’s jetlagged yawning.

“Hot, isn’t it,” he says, this most amiable and un-starry musician. “Should have worn shorts.”

We meet Bernard in July, just returned from America, where New Order have played a short two-week tour of sold-out, big theatre dates. These followed the band’s recent trip to South America where the band played as part of a Lollapalooza bill, and debuted two new songs, “Plastic”, and “Singularity”. They hope to have a new album in the shops in the spring. When it arrives, it will be on Mute.

Bernard, though, is in a retrospective frame of mind, as - not uncommon among musicians from the north-west in the past year or two - he has written a memoir, Chapter And Verse. The book covers his early life in working-class Salford, where he lived with his stepfather, his disabled mother, and her parents, and how this impacted on his music. It details the short life of Joy Division, and the saga of Factory and the Hacienda. It is great, particularly, on the career of New Order. When it goes right, as it has for the band’s albums and wonderful standalone singles, it can feel transcendent, the Man-Machine running smoothly, with a loved-up attitude.

Still, New Order’s recent history hasn’t been completely untroubled. In 2007, the group’s original bassist, Peter Hook, departed the group in a strange and fairly acrimonious manner. Tension had been growing since Hook bought from the nightclub’s receivers, the name and trademarks of the Hagienda, and escalated to a point where Hook announced the band had split. While Bernard is unwilling to get drawn into a war of words, he’s able to address some elements of Hook’s departure.

UNCUT: Does it feel unusual to be making New Order music without Peter Hook?

BERNARD SUMNER: No, it doesn’t, because he was in the position where he didn’t like being with us particularly. There was this resentment directed at me in the last couple of years, and I don’t miss that. I think he lost the trust of the band when he bought the name of the Hacienda. Let me get this right, we didn’t push him out of the band. He claimed that the band had split up, without consulting the band. He seemed to be hating it, particularly hating me.

Why? I don’t know. I think he always felt everyone always sided with me. But that may be because my ideas were a bit more rational, and were less business-orientated. I think when Rob [Gretton, New Order manager] died [in 1999], he saw it then as a chance to seize power in the band. I think he may have felt that I felt the same way, but I didn’t.

How else did you differ? He wasn’t particularly interested in being in the studio and loved playing live - and I preferred being in the studio, that way. Perhaps he wasn’t that interested in electronic music, and wanted to make music of a more throbbing nature, shall we say. I just think that he’s very competitive, and I’m not really - and he couldn’t stand that. I could be a miserable cunt on tour - because I didn’t want to be on tour with him.

He’s had a lot of bands, hasn’t he? Do you think he likes keeping busy? I think he resented the fact that he wasn’t the singer in New Order. I didn’t fight for the role - it was Rob who decided I should be the singer, and I’m always up for a challenge. I just thought, ‘OK, why not? Maybe I’ll learn something.’ I think Hooky likes attention.

Can you remember why you were friends, though? Yes. Because we were both at the bottom of the class. We sat together. It wasn’t because there was any great musical enlightenment that we shared, we were the scum at the back of the class.

Your book makes Salford sound terrifying back then. Kids would sometimes find swords up the chimneys when houses had been pulled down - they’d been hidden there when soldiers returned from the Crimean war. If you walked down the wrong street there was a chance you’d be chased by a gang - and if you were really unlucky, that gang would have a sword or two.

Just the couple of swords. I don’t think I put in the book about the spears. When I was a scooter boy me and Hooky got chased by a gang near Salford precinct. They must have broken into a school or something and taken all the javelins. It didn’t happen all the time, but there was violence.

(The food we ordered has arrived. Bernard adopts an exaggeratedly regional accent).

There weren’t no goose liver parfait then. Nor no beetroot salad, neither.

You weren’t in just one subculture. You were a suedehead on a scooter, who liked Santana. That was unusual. We went to a youth club called North Salford - they had a music room where they would play Stax, Tamla and ska - basically black dance music. And then in the room above they had a stereo and they would play Free, Santana and The Rolling Stones. So you could go between the two.

Were scooters a big deal? You were either a rocker or a scooter boy. I remember being told as a scooter boy - “Don’t ever go to Macclesfield, it’s full of greasers. It’s weird there.” And then I ended up forming a band with two guys from Macclesfield. And a girl, of course. It was better than getting a bus, and good for attracting girls because it made you look cool. It wasn’t mod. It was post-mod: the first wave of skinheads going into suedeheads.

Were you one of those people primed for punk? I was quite happy with the music I was listening to, but the people that made it were remote. When punk came along, we felt that these working-class scumbags we could relate to. It felt like it belonged to us. Of course, it didn’t. But with the Sex Pistols, you knew they were just a bunch of working-class twats like we were. There was a great energy to it, which felt like a renewal. I was going to say it wasn’t a revolution in the sound of music, but it was, because it took it back to its basic elements.

What was Ian Curtis into? He had a different set of influences from us, and he worked in a record shop. He liked The Doors, The Stooges, The Velvet Underground. I met him in clubs. I went round his house and The Idiot had come out that day [March 1977] and he said, “Listen to this, listen to this...” and he played “China Girl” and I was an immediate convert to Iggy Pop. Ian loved Love. He had great taste in music.

Joy Division is a band with a very heavy story and mythology. With the films and so on, do you ever think, ‘Was that really me?’ People’s understanding of people in bands can make them out to be some sort of caricature, but it’s not that. People have more subtle hues to their personality.

You tried past-life regression with Ian, didn’t you? He seemed to have got himself into a mental lockdown about the situation he was in - not a bizarre love triangle, but a distressing love triangle. He was torn between his wife and daughter and Annik [Honore, Belgian journalist]. He didn’t know what to do, he was always asking people what to do - he didn’t want the responsibility of the decision. But it was a question only he could answer. He seemed locked in indecision - and the longer he was locked in indecision, the more harm it was doing him mentally. I guess the hypnotism was a juvenile attempt to clear the blockage and find out what he should do.

You taped the session. The tape ended up with Debbie [Curtis, Ian’s widow], and she gave it back to me. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to it, but I had it transcribed and found it fascinating. He mentioned the Hundred Years War. I think he mentioned the name of the law firm he worked for.

How did you get into all that kind of thing? I read a book on hypnotism, before I knew Ian. We used to do it when we were hanging out in people’s houses. You could stick a pin in someone’s hand and no blood would come out. It was weird. Then I read a book about hypnotic regression - a couple of books, actually. I tried it out on Ian and it worked. I did it twice actually, once at rehearsals and once at my house. I just thought it may help him in some way. One of the books was about how your problems in current life are caused by problems in your past life. I thought I’d give it a go. It didn’t sort him out, though. I never did it to anyone else after what happened to Ian, because it made me a bit paranoid about it.

You were about to go on tour with someone who had just tried to commit suicide... I spent two weeks with him before he died. I remember talking about the first time he attempted suicide. We got the bus back to Peel Green where I lived then and purposefully walked through the cemetery to try and bring it home to him the reality of death. I got this idea that it had become a fantasy in his head about dying. His lyrics came from fantasy, and he would often talk about things in unrealistic ways. I thought it might bring the reality of being dead to life. “This could have been you.”

You didn’t think he’d try suicide again? He was an extremist, he always wanted the music to be manic and extreme. He always wanted to push it as far as possible. We didn’t think he would commit suicide, so when he did, even though he tried it once before, it was a total shock. I felt depressed and sad and angry, frustrated and confused.

It was the end of the band. There was some anger in the band that he’d done that. You may have your own hardships, but you’re not torn apart like that person. You don’t have the problems they have, they’re tortured souls, you’re not. So you’re angry in a selfish way, because you’ve done so much work.

Do you think Ian was still into it? He really wanted to be successful in a band - he went apeshit at me once for taking a holiday because it was getting in the way and was slowing things down. But when he got what he wanted, he realised he didn’t want the reality of it. He wanted to leave and set up a corner bookshop, then a couple of days later would change his mind. But he was a good person, basically. He wasn’t a twat. And that’s how you should judge people - are you a good person? Or are you a twat?

How did you manage to make moving on a positive thing? It was like climbing up a mountain. You’d got up so far then the rope you’d used was cut away - you could only use the rope that was ahead of you. We didn’t have any choice but to carry on. Plus we’d had a taste of it - we really liked being in a band. One of my prime motivations was to have fun - regardless of all the emotional pain, being in a band was a good way of having fun.

An interesting image of the period is you with a soldering iron - building the future. There were a couple of reasons for that. We could hear this exciting technical music, but the technology you needed - we couldn’t afford it. The other was that I suffered really badly from insomnia. The choice was either, listen to Truckers’ Hour, or get my soldering iron out. There was a magazine called Electronics Today, which had a thing in it one day - “Build your own synth”. I ordered the kit. I built the sequencer that drove the instruments on “Blue Monday” and the Vocoder I used on “Blue Monday”.

How did you write? The less we thought about it, the better the music was. The best thing to do was talk about what we watched on telly the night before until we were extremely bored then pick up our instruments and start playing. Then we’d write good music. We didn’t think about success. Our prime motivation was to have fun. The more success you get, you’ll be more famous, you won’t be able to get up to what you get up to - I’ll leave that to your imagination - because the papers will start writing about it.

When did you feel you were getting somewhere? Success for us was to write a song and say, yes, that’s progressed from where we were two months ago. We’d get in clubs free, get drinks tickets... meet a lot of nice young ladies. And travel the world having fun with our friends. We had the right face in the right place at the right time.

You were clear that it was about experimenting with the new technology... The acoustic songs would be jammed. The electronic ones, the aim was to make it sound like it emanated from machines, not human beings, because that’s the aspect of Giorgio Moroder’s work that we liked. I’m not saying it’s better - but it sounded fresher to us if it sounded like a machine had written it. There was a popular misconception at the time, that you could hit a button, press ‘record’ and a hit record would come out. It’s not like that at all: if you put shit in, you get shit out.

You hit an extraordinary run of form from Brotherhood to “True Faith/1963” What was your secret? We were on a roll, maybe more confident in ourselves. Stephen Hague did a great job, but we worked with producers primarily so they could take the shit, be diplomats, politicians in the band. Instead of me saying “Hooky, can you turn your bass down a little bit?”, Stephen would ask him to do it.

You revived the idea that singles should stand alone from albums. We didn’t really understand why a single had to be on an album, we thought it was boring. You could buy a single and buy an album -Factory didn’t really give a fuck. “True Faith/1963” is something that blows everything I’ve said in this interview out of the water.

How so? It was a time when I set out to write a hit single. I think we got a rather large tax bill, and we sat down with Stephen Hague to write a Top 40 hit. I had an idea for a bassline, Gillian had some string ideas, Stephen got some drums down. When we got the track going, I was sent off to the flat we had in London with a bottle of Pernod and told not to show my face again until I’d written the lyrics. We had “1963” as well so I wrote them one after another. I did one, one day, the other the next -1 didn’t like being in the flat on my own.

Did you think it was as good as it is? I thought, it’s another song. It’s not good to look directly into the sun, you know? You should just carry on with what you’re doing.

You mentioned Factory. That and the Hacienda were and are such exciting ideas - but do you resent the fact that you were footing the bill? I resent the fuck out of it. There’s a lot of stupidity went down - it could have been done in a cleverer way and in a more business-like fashion. We came from punk, and Tony [Wilson] believed in anarchy, so it was done according to the anarchist’s handbook. We did lose a hell of a lot of money, but the success outweighs the loss.What’s the opposite word to success?

Failure. Well, it wasn’t a failure. It was a cultural experiment that cost us dearly. We lost a lot of money, but you know what? I’m not skint - I’ve got everything I want. Just done two great tours, so rather than cry over spilt milk, I concentrate on the present, which is great - what’s done is done.

In your book you identify good New Order gigs and also bad ones... The worst gig we ever played was in a place called Aarhus in Denmark. We were playing with Miles Davis - Miles played for longer than he should have, and we’d been drinking. So by the time we went on we were drunk - and Gillian was very drunk. Someone had pushed the pitch wheel up and sent her whole synth up a semitone -the worst interval in music. She was so pissed she didn’t notice she was playing a semitone above everyone else. I was trying to pitch between the synth and the band, and it was just terrible. We were drunk, out of tune, really terrible. The police had to be called for our own protection.

Was drink often your undoing? We used to get too drunk... we’d be completely shitfaced onstage. We also used to do the set before we went onstage, so we’d either put a bum set together that just didn’t work, like all the tempos and keys would clash. Or we’d put in a song we hadn’t rehearsed for five years. On top of that, we’d be really drunk. After about 28 years, we sussed this was a problem, and rectified things by playing pretty much the same set, but changing a couple of songs in it.

One of the things I like about New Order is that you’ve not seemed to have to change who you are to get to the level you’re at. Would you agree? That goes back to the whole point about punk - that anyone can do this. You’ve got to know what’s good - and I believe if you’ve got a great love for music, if you can hear a piece of music and find it earth-shatteringly beautiful - you can reverse the process, like a mirror. You can reverse it and make music like that after a period of time learning a certain set of skills.

What do you want from New Order in the future? You can’t reinvent the wheel, can you, but we did to a certain extent with “Blue Monday”. To reinvent music is a bit of a tall order. When we wrote “Blue Monday” and “Everything’s Gone Green”, it was the future, weird and new. Electronic music isn’t the future anymore, is it? It’s the present.

AS BERNARD DRIVES me back to the station, he chats about the family time he has for the next few weeks, and his plans for the rest of this extremely pleasant day. “Feels like a barbecue night tonight,” he says, this person who can with some justification claim to have altered the course of music. “Think I’ll drop by the supermarket in a bit.”

After that, he thinks, a well-earned rest before dinner.

“Get on a lounger with my Speedos on,” he grins. “Not a pretty sight.”

Chapter And Verse: New Order, Joy Division And Me by Bernard Sumner is published by Bantam Press

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BERNARD'S BOOK CORNER

LEAVES LIKE US

Bernard’s Cold War-themed current reading. ‘The atmosphere was very much like Unknown Pleasures.”

A SPY AMONG FRIENDS
BEN MACINTYRE

“About Kim Philby. He wrote his own story under the auspices of the KGB. But I think this one gets closer to the truth. Although you still don’t know what really motivated him to betray his own country and friends. Was he mad or bad? I think he was blackmailed."

THE GREATEST TRAITOR
ROGER HERMISTON

“About George Blake who was a Soviet spy in British intelligence. Just about to read this."

NOTHING TO ENVY
BARBARA DEMICK

“About life in North Korea."

LOVE IN THE SUN
LEO WALMSLEY

“A love story set in Fowey in Cornwall in the 1930s, a very innocent snapshot of the place, the period and the author."

EVIL RELATIONS
DAVID SMITH WITH CAROL ANNE LEE

“This is the guy who turned the Moors Murderers in. That horrible episode affected anyone who was a child in Manchester in the ’60s."

THE DOOR IN THE WALL
HG WELLS

“A short but strange story.”

SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME
MARLON BRANDO

“It’s not about acting, it’s about him and how he thinks. I found it very interesting."

A VOYAGE FOR MADMEN
PETER NICHOLS

“About a yacht race in the late '60s, but so much more than that. A very exciting book.”

AGENT ZIGZAG
BEN MACINTYRE

“About a wartime double agent. An excellent, true and fascinating story.”

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD
JOHN LE CARRE

“The atmosphere is so austere it kind of enlightened me as to what people saw in the music of Joy Division. The atmosphere here is very much like Unknown Pleasures."

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FUCK OFF!

How bad 1970s customer service hastened punk

BERNARD: “I bought a couple of albums I didn’t like because I liked the cover - Argus by Wishbone Ash and Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans. When I got them home I just really really didn’t like them. I tried to take them back to the shop to get my money back, and the guy told me to fuck off. Literally. It looked like it was potentially interesting music - but it wasn’t to me, it was empty and soulless. So I was a bit lost after that.

"We met Irvine Welsh in Chicago and he told us exactly the same story - with the same record. ‘Would they let me have me money back? Would they fuck!' Customer service in those days was terrible.”

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GET READY!

The word on the new NEW ORDER songs

They were just written after Christmas. I’ve decided to write titles, then write a song and choose a title. "Singularity", we worked with Tom Rowlands from the Chemical Brothers as producer. We put that together so we could play it live on the Lollapalooza tour we did in South America in March. It was originally called "Drop Guitar" because originally it was written on a guitar that had a dropped tuning on it. We came to play it in Brazil, and Steve put it on the setlist as “Drop Guitar". Someone in Brazil grabbed the setlist and wrote on the internet, “Yes, they have a new song, called ‘Drop The Guitar’." So that’s how that happens.

"Plastic" is very new. We wanted a song to fit in the end of the set. That’s how we tend to write songs - to fit in a place in the set. The song became angry though I wasn’t. I have a title, actually. It sounds like Detroit techno? We’ve got another one called "Detroit techno one”, actually. It’s a working title of a song called “Unlearn This Hatred”, we’ve got two versions of it. There’s another eight written with vocals, but not recorded. We want to write another two, and then we’re going to try and get them all finished for January.