2019 02 New Order Uncut

DREAMS NEVER END

From the tragedy of Ian Curtis's suicide, NEW ORDER emerged as one of the defining groups of their generation. With a new boxset devoted to their debut album Movement due, BERNARD SUMNER, PETER HOOK, GILLIAN GILBERT and STEPHEN MORRIS recall faltering first steps, the mystical Witch Doctors of Zimbabwe, a Hells Angel with a taste for LSD, a run-in with Britt Ekland's brother and a curious incident involving Pink Floyd's stage gear. "It was amazing that we survived, really," Sumner tells Stephen Dalton. Photo by KEVIN CUMMINS

Looking back nearly 40 years, Bernard Sumner is weighing up his complex feelings towards New Order’s difficult early days. “When we first started New Order it was both a burden and a blessing,” he explains. “People were interested in us because obviously we were Joy Division, but it was a burden in that we couldn’t be Joy Division. We had to reinvent everything, but we’re not rock chameleons like David Bowie or Madonna. We didn’t have a clue, really.” 

It is early November and Sumner is in London, along with bandmates Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert, preparing to play a sell-out show at Alexandra Palace. It is the band’s only UK date of 2018, a welcome opportunity to check in with the home crowd before they embark on a South American stadium tour. This London show crowns one of the strongest and most poignant comebacks in recent memory; a rebirth that began in 2011 and produced the band’s first album of new studio material for 10 years, 2015’s Music Complete.

It has, of course, been a long and often bumpy journey for New Order. And while they have come a long way - geographically, spiritually, emotionally - from messy beginnings in scuzzy Manchester rehearsal rooms, they remain hemmed in by memories and ghosts. Ironically, for such unsentimental, forward-thinking modernists, their past is never that far away. As much as for their brilliant music, New Order are simultaneously defined by the strange vicissitudes of their own history - from the premature deaths of Ian Curtis, producer Martin Hannett, manager Rob Gretton and label boss Tony Wilson, through the rise and fall of Factory Records and the Hacienda, to their recent bitter rift with former bassist Peter Hook.

Once again, though, their past is about to edge a little closer. New Order begin a reissue programme in March with Movement -The Definitive Edition, a boxset devoted to their 1981 debut album. Meanwhile, Jon Savage’s oral history of Joy Division, This Searing Light, The Sun And Everything Else, also arrives in March, just a few months before the 40th anniversary of the band’s Unknown Pleasures album. Such weird logistical clashes only further highlight the band’s first, faltering steps as bereaved young men struggling with the truncated career of Joy Division and much longer afterlife, without Curtis, as New Order.

“Was it therapeutic for them to continue? Probably, yeah,” says keyboard player Gillian Gilbert. “You stick together when you’ve some sad loss like that; it was like a family.”

“One of the things I think people liked about New Order in the early days was the shambolic, couldn’t-give-a-fuckness about it,” says drummer Stephen Morris. “We didn’t know what the fuck we were doing. So we just got pissed and hoped nobody would notice.”

“Hike a challenge,” explains Bernard Sumner. “Give me something difficult to do, if you give me enough time. I’ll be able to do it. Most people would learn to sing, get a bit of experience and then make a record. But I made a record first, as a singer. It wasn’t really the right way to do it. We had to go through that painful experience to come out on the other side. In the end, there was no right way to do it.” He pauses. “The thing about now,” he continues, “is we are in a good place. So you don’t really hark back to the bad old days.”

Perspectives shift over time, of course, but powerful emotional undercurrents remain. Hook left New Order in 2007, but continues to honour their historic works with his new band, The Light. He remains hugely fond of their debutalbum, Movement: “To me, the beauty of Movement is the synchronicity between the three instruments: the six-string bass, the guitar, the drums.When it worked, it was magic. It was all about the three of us clicking in together.”

Perhaps inevitably, Sumner takes a different view as he recalls that strange, liminal period when Joy Division became New Order and three friends found some deep, unarticulated solace in the music they made together. “Our attitude was, ‘Whatever happens, we have to make it work,”’ he says. “Because it’s the only thing we’ve got.’”

PEOPLE often speak of Joy Division in terms of the urban fabric of Manchester itself; how the ambience of a crumbling 19th-century industrial city seeped into their stark, intense music. Later, when New Order were in full flight, they somehow captured the more colourful optimism of Manchester during the 1980s, the city reinvigorated and regenerated. At the dawn of that decade, though, few parts of the city were as insalubrious as the streets around Pinky’s nightclub, next to Broughton Baths, where New Order rented their first rehearsal space. Stephen Morris cheerily describes it as a “step down” from their previous rehearsal room, TJ Davidson’s on Little Peter Street - a former industrial warehouse where, to avoid rats rumoured to inhabit the toilet, Sumner admits “we used to piss through a hole in the floor”. The space at Pinky’s not only had an even bigger hole and actual rats, it also had a collapsing ceiling. “It was a shithole,” Morris admits. Hook recalls it more fondly, as “a freezing-cold pit with a dangerous hole in the floor”.

It was here, on June 16, 1980, that Sumner, Hook and Morris met to discuss their future - or, at the very least, to see if they had one. This was less than a month since Ian Curtis had taken his own life, May 18, the day before Joy Division were due to leave for their first American tour. “I remember Stephen went to the funeral and decided to carry on,” says Gilbert, “which was all a bit weird really because everybody was so upset, Tony and Rob and all the band. It was just like, ‘What are we going to do?”’

Bereavement can bring a range of emotions and physical reactions that may be unfamiliar, frightening and uncontrollable. It is likely all three surviving members of Joy Division experienced moments of crisis following Curtis’s death, but rather than pause to mourn the departed, they took advice from the living. “Rob particularly thought that if you didn’t keep this fucking boat sailing, it might sink,” Hook recalls. “And Tony was happy to join in with him on that because he loved our music. I don’t think anybody wanted us to sink, they just wanted us to carry on.” 

Encouraged by Gretton and Wilson, the surviving trio set to work, guided by something more elusive and complex than merely carrying on. Hook wrote one song, “Dreams Never End”, just hours after the singer’s wake. On another composition, “Truth”, Sumner clearly channels Curtis in his vocal cadences and lyrical tone. Meanwhile, two of the final Joy Division songs, “Ceremony” and “In A Lonely Place”, were absorbed into the trio’s repertoire. The tapes of Curtis singing were so muffled that Sumner had to guess the lyrics, even after running them through a graphic equaliser.

Even if their music was still anchored in the past, a shaky rebirth required a new band name. Morris recalls a long afternoon spent in the Dover Castle pub near Pinky’s, where Gretton proposed dozens of potential names from his notebooks, mostly borrowed from terrorist groups and revolutionary movements: Shining Path, Black September, The Immortals, Man Ray, Theatre Of Cruelty, Year Zero, Arab Legion were all options. More exotic contenders included The Witch Doctors Of Zimbabwe and The Sunshine Valley Dance Band.

“Steve used to be in a group called The Sunshine Valley Dance Band,” Sumner laughs. “It was him and two old blokes... same as it is now.”

Gretton and Morris lobbied hard for The Witch Doctors Of Zimbabwe, prompting Sumner and Hook to threaten to quit. They ultimately got their first choice - New Order, a name taken from a Guardian article about the emerging post-war regime in Kampuchea. “We chose New Order because we thought it sounded neutral,” Sumner explains. “It was nothing to do with fucking Hitler,” he sighs, for the millionth time.

A new start was required, certainly. But for those crucial early months, Joy Division’s past inevitably kept intruding into New Order’s present. In July 1980, Factory released Joy Division’s final studio album, Closer. Meanwhile, just weeks after Curtis’s funeral, the band briefly considered recruiting a new singer. With producer Martin Hannett, they entered Graveyard Studios in Prestwich accompanied by Factory signing Kevin Hewick.

“We did two of my songs, no rehearsal,” Hewick says. “Martin was very droll. He said it sounded like Fairport Convention, then lay down and fell asleep under the mixing desk. I was completely out of my depth and, as the day wore on, I found Bernard a little edgy. At one point he threw his guitar on the floor and stormed out. But Peter Hook did say to me, ‘Bernard’s taken Ian’s death the worst of the three of us, and he’s finding it really hard because you’re standing where Ian would have stood...’”

Sumner admits he found this a fraught process. “Everythingyou did felt weird,” he nods. “Playing the songs felt weird, rehearsing without Ian felt weird, going in with other artists felt weird.”

Both Hewick and Crispy Ambulance singer Alan Hempsall later claimed they were potential candidates to replace Curtis, but Hook disputes this. Whatever discussions may have taken place, the band soon decided nobody could replace Curtis without risking negative comparisons. Instead, they held internal auditions, with Gretton and Hannett as referees. “Rob made us sing in the practice place, which was awful,” Hook recalls. “I’ve got those tapes of us singing dead loud, with the backing track quiet, so he could hear it, like an audition tape. My God, it’s excruciating.”

Hannett was withering about New Order’s early vocal efforts. “His line was, ‘You’re all shit,”’ says Hook. Sumner later emerged as lead vocalist and lyricist, but only after several difficult, agonising months. Mark Reeder, a longtime friend of New Order who became Factory’s representative in Berlin, says Sumner effectively had no choice. “Bernard was simply the best one at singing and was therefore thrust into the role of frontman, which at first he detested,” he explains. “I guess he felt a bit unworthy being forced to step into Ian’s shoes. 1 remember him once showing me some freshly penned lyrics he’d written, but he said he was too ashamed to sing them. He thought they were too daft.”

Sumner’s ability to play resourcefully the cards he was dealt proved critical in what happened next. “At the start we had everyone pooling in and writing lyrics, but we ended up with some Frankenstein-type lyrics and it just didn’t work,” he says. “I couldn’t put any feeling into them. So after a bit I just started doing it on my own.”

On July 30, a twist of fate gave New Order their first opportunity to test these embryonic songs live. The Beach Club wasan arty film-and-music night held above Oozits, a gay club in Newgate Street, Shudehill, just north of Manchester city centre. When Factory Benelux signings The Names pulled out of playing, New Order stepped in, archly billing themselves as The No Names. “It was a big secret,” recalls Terry Mason, who spent decades as tour manager for both Joy Division and New Order. “The crew was only told the week of the gig. In keeping with a lot of Joy Division gigs, the place was a shithole. Correction, it was a tiny shithole up some very tight stairs.”

Former Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon was part of the collective behind this short-lived precursor of the Hacienda: “The upstairs room was dark, with little stage lighting, and my abiding memory is of a roomful of silhouettes and a tentative emergent synth-based sound, faltering then flowing. I turned to Pete Shelley and remarked, ‘Someone’s been listening to their Popol Vuh soundtracks for Werner Herzog.’”

The No Names played a short set of half-formed New Order tracks, with all three members alternating on vocals. “We did ‘In A Lonely Place’, ‘Ceremony’, ‘Dreams Never End’, ‘Truth’, I think, and maybe one more,” Morris recalls. “There was a long jam while I tried to get the tape recorder working. That was a fucking bad idea. For some reason we recorded the drum machine onto tape. Why we didn’t just use the drum machine I don’t know. I remember two girls at the front saying, ‘This lot are just ripping off Joy Division...’”

“It was a pretty cool happening,” adds Sumner. “There was no stage, you were on the same level. There were a lot of tall people there, for some strange reason, so lots of people were looking down on us. But I remember it being an OK gig. That was a glimmer of hope.”

“I’m sure that there will be people in Manchester who claim to have been there and will dine out on their stories about how wondrous it was,” recalls Mason. “I was definitely there and it was three unsure young men and a tape machine, and the start of an ongoing ordeal.”

“We were pretty tight,” Hook insists. “We were scared to fucking death, absolutely terrified. It was just terrifying to come back, and it was pretty soon, wasn’t it? Ian had died on May 18, so for us to write seven or eight songs, get vocals finished on them, and get ready to play was pretty hot. That’s a lot to do in two months. We didn’t play one Joy Division song.”

“Rob came up with this brilliant idealistic concept that we shouldn’t play any Joy Division songs,” Sumner says. “We all agreed, I don’t know why. It was virtually commercial suicide. It was a kind of idealistic thread that ran through everything we did. And most of the idealism, I have to say, came from Rob or Tony. Personally, I just wanted an easy life. Ha! But for some reason we agreed and we didn’t play Joy Division songs. It seemed very high and noble, but obviously that made things much more difficult for us.”

WHEN New Order tour today, they assemble first at a facility they own in Cheshire - gear storage, practice rooms, strong cups of tea - to blow out the cobwebs. It is a far more comfortable way of doing business than the raw, tentative work done at Pinky’s over the summer of 1980. In early September, after a short run of low-key live dates, the band made a trip to Sheffield for a recording session with friends and ex-labelmates Cabaret Voltaire. Later that month, they flew to New York for the first time - a kind of consolation prize for the cancelled Joy Division tour in May. Familiar faces were on hand to greet them: both Wilson and Hannett were also in the city, recording A Certain Ratio’s second album To Each....

“On our arrival in New York, Tony set about drawing a map of Manhattan, warning us of the dangers,” recalls Mason. “We were staying at the Iroquois Hotel on 44th Street, and in 1980 Times Square and 42nd Street were not the Disneyland that they are today. In order to look tough, Bernard promptly gave himself an anchor tattoo in biro!” 

Coincidentally, The Clash were also staying at the Iroquois. A north-south rivalry quickly developed between the two bands, exchanging verbal insults and fighting over the hotel’s free bar snacks. Inevitably, escape to America also brought fresh disaster for New Order. Just hours after their first American show, at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey, on September 20, the rental van loaded with all their gear was stolen from outside the Iroquois. The band blamed their road crew, who had neglected to disable the van by removing the distributor cap.

“Someone stole the van with all the fucking equipment in,” Sumner nods. “I remember me, Peter and Rob were sharing one room, like the Three Bears. There was a knock on the door in the morning and Tony came in laughing. He said, ‘It’s wonderful, darlings! It’s the perfect ending! You couldn’t have scripted it better...’”

New Order had to postpone shows and buy new gear, losing thousands of pounds in the process. The NYC police initially seemed indifferent to the robbery, although they did eventually recover the van, almost empty. “The only thing they couldn’t take was Pink Floyd’s transformer,” Morris laughs. “We needed a transformer to convert our British gear to US power. We only had a bass amp and a guitar amp. So our wonderful roadie Terry hires Pink Floyd’s transformer for doing their stadium gigs, it was fucking huge! They couldn’t lift it out of the van, so they left it.”

Despite these setbacks, New Order found America liberating and inspiring. During their stay they recorded an early version of their debut single, the retooled Joy Division track “Ceremony”, with Hannett producing. Meanwhile, tour organiser Ruth Polsky generously introduced them to the city’s many hedonistic delights.

“We were just lads, on holiday, going fucking mental and dragging anybody down with us,” Hook laughs. “Because we could! And the more puritanical you were, shall we say, the more we dragged you down... We were boys on the piss.” 

Critically, Polsky also introduced the band to fabled Manhattan clubs like Danceteria and the Paradise Garage. The idea for the Hacienda, and for the band’s later electronic adventures, was partly born during these visits. “We saw these wonderful clubs,” Hook recalls, “Rob thought that he could create that kind of groovy club for ourselves, because the clubs in Manchester weren’t groovy.” 

New Order’s initial American shows were still works in progress, brief and chaotic. “1 think they regarded us as experimental avant-garde new wave,” Sumner deadpans. “Which it was, in a way. Unintentionally. I just think we were in the right place, at the right time, with the right face.” “At that time in America, any band from England was a big thing,” Morris says. “It was the second British invasion or whatever. You would get people coming to see you because you were English.”

One witness to these early shows was Factory’s sleeve designer, Peter Saville. “I remember the unbearable tensions beforehand and Bernard going on stage drunk,” he told Uncut. “The most touching thing 1 ever saw was in New York, when they’d just become New Order. They did ‘In A Lonely Place’, which is so fucking disturbing with lines like ‘How I wish you were here with me now’. As they finished with the singing, the arrangements on stage slipped back to when they were Joy Division. Hooky moved to the right, Bernard dropped back to the left and they left a space. It was weird, almost instinctive. I’m not sure they were even aware of it, but it seemed to make sense somehow.”

IF New Order were a different kind of band, we’d maybe be talking in hushed terms about how they dutifully chose to soldier on as a trio, despite the glaring absence of Curtis, remaining sensitive and reverential custodians of Joy Division’s legacy. But they had new sounds to explore, bold choices that required pragmatic solutions. To that end, Gillian Gilbert was invited to join in October, an extra pair of hands as Sumner struggled to balance vocals, guitar and keyboards.

“They knew 1 could play guitar, basics, but I hadn’t a clue about keyboards,” Gilbert says. “It was a different world because I’d been to an all girls’ school, I’d done graphics at Stockport, and just being plonked in a band that you admired was... it was all very new. So I borrowed my sister’s little Bontempi organ and learnt ‘Truth’, and then I went into rehearsals with them in Cheetham Hill. It was a different world.”

Prior to New Order, Gilbert had played a single show with her teenage punk band The Inadequates, and briefly guested on guitar for Joy Division in December 1979 at Eric’s in Liverpool after Sumner injured his hand. According to Hook, though, she was party chosen because she did not threaten New Order’s existing power balance. “Gillian was so inexperienced, she just did what you told her to do,” Hook says. “We were still a bunch of dirty bastards, japing, shagging, drinking, whatever. We didn’t make any allowances for her.”

Although Hook has lately downplayed her creative role in the band, Gilbert remembers feeling welcomed into a partnership of equals.

“It was all a learning curve for me,” she says. “I mean, Peter Hook’s said a lot of things about me, but he never said anything when I was there. Everybody got on great.”

On October 25, the four-piece New Order made their live debut at The Squat on Devas Street, close to Manchester University. Billed as special guests of The Durutti Column, they played seven songs. Gilbert recalls it as an exciting baptism.

“I was terrified, but excited to be doing something,” she nods. “Hooky used to say, ‘Don’t worry if you make a mistake, just look as if you mean it.’ Which was a good bit of advice, really. I think they were the best gigs, where something breaks down or something weird happens.” Gilbert’s arrival helped New Order expand their increasingly electronic sound palette. Joy Division had already embraced synthesisers on their Closer album with their primitive monophonic Powertran Transcendent 2000, built by Sumner from a kit. As New Order, they began acquiring more gear, including polyphonic synths, primitive drum machines and early sequencers. The latter, especially, would prove crucial to their future.

Much of New Order’s early electronic gear was either built or customised by Sumner with help from a “proper boffin” called Martin Usher, who they met through Hannett. “Martin lived in a big house in Whalley Range,” Sumner recalls. “He had a lodger downstairs who happened to be a Hells Angel, who would drive his motorbike down a ramp into the basement. We asked him if he wanted any money as payment and he said, ‘No no, I don’t want any money but Jack the Hells Angel downstairs is very keen on LSD and I don’t know where you get it from. Could you get some LSD and then we’ll call it quits...?”’

Drum machines, sequencers and synths first began to reshape New Order’s sound on Movement-era tracks like “Truth”, “Hurt” and “Everything’s Gone Green”. But recreating these songs live on temperamental analogue equipment proved troublesome, especially as Gretton insisted the band never use backing tapes.

“Rob had this idealistic thing that we had to recreate everything live," Sumner explains. “So we took the gear out live that wasn’t designed to go out live, and had some terrible moments with it breaking down. A lot of that early stuff was made with perhaps three synthesisers, and in some cases we modified them so they could do things they weren’t suppose to do. But we got every last drop out of those machines, and I’m still of that persuasion today.”

TO cement Gilbert’s arrival, New Order’s expanded four-piece configuration recorded a sleeker new version of “Ceremony ”, released as their debut single in March 1981. The winter brought more live gigs, their first John Peel radio session, and final preparations for recording their debut album. But before Movement came unfinished business. In February, the band briefly returned to Pink Floyd’s Britannia Row studios in London to add final overdubs to “The Kill” and “The Only Mistake” for Joy Division’s posthumous double album, Still.

Hook recalls “a weird, out-of-body experience” playing along to a disembodied Ian Curtis. “We didn’t do many overdubs, because really nobody was into it. But Rob’s big thing was, ‘Let’s finish it off and then we can put it all away.’”

Still in a fragile psychological state, New Order returned to Strawberry Studios in Stockport - where Joy Division had recorded Unknown Pleasures - in March. Martin Hannett’s deepening drug addiction, grief over Curtis, and undisguised contempt for the talents of the surviving members crushed their fragile morale. Recording “Procession”, the snappy synth-driven track that became the band’s second single, Hannett forced Sumner to record more than 40 vocal takes.

“He was bombastic, he was bitter, he was antagonistic,” Hook says. “He kept saying to us, ‘Get on with it! You're shit! Fucking get out of my way! I wish you’d have died with Ian...’”

“Martin was very odd,” Morris nods. “You sometimes got the feeling with him that he didn’t think we should be doing it at all.”

“He just didn’t seem to think it was going to work, which wasn’t a good vibe to have in the studio,” Sumner shrugs. One freezing night, the events of the last year finally caught up with the band. “We all broke down in tears,” Hook recalls. “We were recording during the night at Martin’s insistence - and it’s actually quite alienating working through the night when everybody else is in bed, especially in those days. It was a weird situation, we were all really fucked up about Ian, and Martin’s attitude was hateful. Considering that he was much older than us - he was 30-odd, we were 24 - he should have known better.”

In late April, New Order relocated to Marcus Music studios in west London to finish Movement. Hannett was now in “full-on arsehole mode”, according to Hook. He demanded a gram of cocaine before he would even start work, and spent much of the sessions locked away in the tape store cupboard with a small audio speaker hooked up by engineer Chris Nagle, insisting he would only come out if he heard anything worth his attention.

“We were getting paid £1.50 a day and he was demanding a £50 gram of coke before he’d start work,” Hook fumes. “And then keeping us up all night because he was off his tits... Just fucking outrageous behaviour.” Adding to the tension, London itself was on edge after the Brixton riots earlier that month. “It was really weird because there was loads of fighting on the streets,” Gilbert remembers. “It was such a change coming from Manchester.”

“We scared the living daylights out of the receptionist,” says Sumner. “We’d just been for a sandwich, and they’d locked the studio doors. We started banging on the doors and they were saying, ‘It’s the rioters! It’s the rioters!’ She was very freaked out.” 

Although Hook sang lead vocal on two tracks, “Dreams Never End” and “Doubts Even Here”, Sumner had solidified his position as frontman by the time Movement was recorded. “To be honest, Bernard singing worked out well,” admits Hook. “It enabled me and Steve to play together, him to sing then the keyboards and the guitar coming in after the vocal; it gave you the perfect framework for New Order. That formula became just as important as Joy Division’s.”

The work carried out between April 24 and May 4 captures a band in transition; the songs on Movement gesture obliquely towards New Order’s electronic future but are still beholden to the austerer, cavernous atmospheres of Joy Division. While the percussive disco-noir of “Senses” might have slotted comfortably into Closer, its descending synthesiser coda could almost be a rough sketch for “Blue Monday”. In this blurry phase, where one band ends and another begins, it is possible to view Movement as both Joy Division’s third album as much as it is New Order’s first.

During the sessions, the spectral presence of Curtis continued to manifest in some unexpected ways. According to Joy Division folklore, the stern “ICB” was titled after a tasteless acronym for “Ian Curtis Buried”. Not quite true, as Hook explains.

“It was actually the name of the ferry company that took our gear over to America when it was all stolen,” he says. “We came back with very little, but what we did come back with had ICB stickers on it, I went, ‘Oh look: ICB, Ian Curtis Buried...’ To be honest with you, losing Ian and losing the gear was pretty much a complete burial of everything to do with Joy Division.”

Tellingly, both Hook and Sumner adopt a familiar deep croon on Movement, a lonely baritone adrift in a strange, unsettling sonic landscape. “We were all imitating Ian’s vocals,” admits Hook. “Steve wrote the most vocals. Steve came in early with a few songs finished, then we all worked together, changed words and stuff like that.

“Steve was very good - he got discouraged as he is easily discouraged, so he stopped. By the time we got to Power, Corruption & Lies he’d stopped writing any vocals.”

“It was all I knew,” Sumner shrugs. “We thought what Ian did was good, and I wanted to be good as well. We had to start somewhere, and it seemed better to start with something. There was lot of self-doubt as well. ‘Is what we’re doing any good?’ 

“Personally, I didn’t want it to sound like sub-Joy Division, I didn’t want to sound like sub-Ian. It did feel a little bit like that. But I didn’t really know any better because... well, we were Joy Division, but without the singer.”

To Hannett, New Order were emphatically not Joy Division, a band he once scathingly described as “one genius and three Manchester United supporters.” While an increasingly assertive Sumner and Hook kept pushing for more “physical punk energy” in the studio mixes, Hannett persisted with his more cerebral, avant-rock textures.

Eventually, towards the end of recording Movement, band and producer had one final, irreconcilable fallout - over “Everything’s Gone Green”, an early milestone in the band’s emerging arsenal of pulsing, mechanoid anthems. Peter Hook recalls this as a revolutionary “fuck you” moment in New Order’s evolution. The workers had seized the means of production.

“We wrote ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ towards the end of Movement,” says Gilbert. “But we didn’t put it on the record, because at that time we were completely fed up of Martin. So we said, ‘Let’s go in and produce ourselves.’”

“We had a different sound in our heads, especially when we first started using synthesisers,” Sumner explains. “That sound culminated in ‘Blue Monday’ - we would never have got that with Martin. The ultimate moment of friction really was on ‘Everything’s Gone Green’. We were mixing the 12-inch at Marcus and we said we wanted more drums, more drive. He said, ‘Fuck off, you can do it!’ and just walked out.”

“We sat there with Chris Nagle, who said, ‘You don’t know what you’re fucking doing!’ And we didn’t. But by the time we got to 'Blue Monday’ we did know what we were doing. If we’d never taken those first steps we wouldn’t have had that success. So, ultimately, I believe we were right.”

SOON after completing Movement, New Order embarked on a European tour. In Brussels, the band reunited with an old friend, Annik Honore, Factory Benelux co-founder, who promoted their show at l’Ancienne Belgique on May 15. After the gig, Mark Reeder recalls a lively night out with Echo And The Bunnymen at the glitzy Mirano club.

“Bernard was on his best mischievous behaviour,” Reeder says. “After about six Pernod and oranges, he exercised his VIP privilege, went up onto the closed-off balcony and took a piss-down onto the people dancing on the dancefloor. Time to leave.”

With no encores and no Joy Division songs, New Order’s short sets often provoked extreme reactions. In Hamburg, for instance, a gang of right-wing skinheads showered the stage with bottles and invaded the band’s dressing room. In Stockholm, Hook drove the band’s Transit van into the back of the promoter’s car, shunting it through a red traffic light. The promoter turned out to be Britt Ekland’s brother.

“The European dates were fun,” recalls Terry Mason. “We were using 10cc’s PA system and crew. They didn’t know what to make of us. They couldn’t get their heads around 35-minute sets, tiny band stage requirements; we were the new big name in Manchester and they couldn’t understand how or why.”

Still nervous about his new responsibilities as frontman, Sumner was drinking excessively before each performance. On June 20, when New Order played Glastonbury festival for the first time, he fell over on stage. “He never did it when he was in Joy Division,” notes Hook. “He never got drunk before he went on, he was never pissed and obnoxious, throwing things at the audience, screaming, shouting. If I’m honest, we asked him for too much, too soon."

When the band resumed touring in September 1981, they had a game-changing new song in their set. Built around a vivid robotic earworm from a pulse sequencer, “Temptation” was New Order’s first full-blooded dancefloor anthem; a benchmark marriage of human and machine. The song can be counted alongside “Everything’s Gone Green”, “Procession”, “Hurt” and “Prime 586” as part of a remarkable series of early works that signposted New Order’s revolutionary new direction.

A modernist manifesto crammed into seven gleaming minutes, “Temptation” was NewOrder’s first self-produced single, and became their first Top 30 hit in May 1982. It remains their most played live song today.

Crucially, “Temptation” also feels like a weight lifting with its euphoric lightness of spirit and surprisingly sweet-natured lyrics, “I never met anyone quite like you before’’. If Movement offered a path from one band to the next, then once New Order were finally - fully - New Order, they could embrace their future in earnest.

“It’s always been about the future,” Sumner says. “Without that attitude I wouldn’t be here today, and we wouldn’t have come up with tunes like ‘Blue Monday’ or ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ or ‘Temptation’ or ‘Everything’s Gone Green’. Right from the early days of Joy Division, I always had a nagging thought in the back of my head: wouldn’t it be fabulous if you could move music forward?”

IT is approaching evening in London and Sumner, Morris and Gilbert are considering the lasting impact that Movement has had on New Order’s career. “Movement is like Ralf And Florian, the album that Kraftwerk made,” says Sumner. “It doesn’t really sound like Kraftwerk, it’s the first few faltering steps getting to Kraftwerk. I guess Movement is that in relation to New Order.”

“I loved Movement, when it was finished,” Gilbert smiles. “I think it now gets a bit of bad press from the rest of the band.”

New Order were on tour in America when the album was finally released in the UK on November 19, 1981. It stalled at Number 30 in the charts. By cruel contrast, Still - Joy Division’s posthumous double album of offcuts and live tracks - reached No 5 just weeks before.

“Movement was an awkward album,” says Terry Mason. “It was an exorcism, a rite of passage, a naming of the dead.

“My reaction was very similar to the band, that once the new album was done, you would never listen to it. There was more interest in what was next.”

Mark Reeder has a more generous take on the album, praising the avant-garde sound palette and Stephen Morris’s strong percussive presence. “The band recorded the last few songs they had written with lan on Movement and then they closed that chapter,” he says. “I think it is a wonderful homage to the departed.”

Movement was a rites-of-passage album, with all the awkward adolescent psychodrama that implies. A throwing off of oppressive parental authority; a first tentative shift from monochrome to colour, a settling of accounts. But it also contains some prescient pointers to New Order’s imperial phase, a small but significant step towards “Blue Monday” and an unassailable run of ’80s albums, from the rugged brutalism of Power, Corruption & Lies to the glorious melancholia of Technique.

Almost 40 years later, Movement still radiates the clumsy, inarticulate, hopeful, painfully self-conscious intensity of youth. Inescapably grounded in tragedy, it is not quite the end of the tunnel, but it reaches out towards the light ahead.

From their current heights of comfortable middle age, do New Order miss anything about the Movement period? The punk anarchy, the scuzzy hotels, the explosively erratic live shows...?

“Fuck no!” laughs Peter Hook. “We had no lifestyle, we were absolutely skint. But I suppose in an odd way you do miss it, because then you were doing it for love, you were doing it for passion. You never knew what was going to happen, whether it was going to be asuccess or not. It was all about this mad, almost primeval drive to do what you were doing.”

“It was amazing that we survived, really,” Sumner concludes. “I was a pretty crap singer at the time. It was fucking total chaos live. I was more interested in getting drunk and off it than doing gigs. And we didn’t have any money.

“But somehow it worked. Maybe because we seemed different from all the other career-opportunity bands who were just interested in fame and fortune. Then, of course, we got better...”

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"ALL OF A SUDDEN A COPPER WALKED IN..."

The inside story of New Order’s first recording session in September 1981

"THERE is a school of thought that Manchester bands thought Sheffield bands were cool," says Stephen 'Mal' Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire, whose lo-fi Western Works studio hosted New Order's first tentative recording session. “It was like Compass Point in The Bahamas for them," Mai quips. “They just wanted to see how the other half lives,"

On September 7, 1981, New Order's early three-piece incarnation journeyed to Western Works for a single late-night session. Friends and former Factory labelmates, Cabaret Voltaire had even attended Ian Curtis's funeral. “We were good friends with the Cabs, a mutual appreciation society," says Bernard Sumner.

“If I remember rightly, it was more of a push by Rob," adds Peter Hook. “It was just to keep us going; it was maybe all about not letting us dwell too much on what had happened."

The handful of tracks New Order recorded in Sheffield, long available as scratchy bootlegs, receive their first official release on the Movement boxset. Completed in a single night, with all three band members alternating lead vocals, the session yielded rough versions of "Ceremony", "Dreams Never End" and “Truth". The band also laid down a rowdy glam-punk number called “Homage", which they never revisited, and a spoofy funk-rap jam featuring Mai and Rob Gretton on vocals, later titled “Are You Ready Are You Ready Are You Ready For This?"

As the sessions wound down, New Order were alarmed to receive a surprise visit from the local constabulary. "Rob had headphones on. the others had a big spliff going," Mal says. “Then allot a sudden a fucking copper walked in! Ha! Rob blanched, but he didn't know the copper was a friend of ours, Alan. Western Works was on his beat. He used to call in and check we were alright. And, er, partake of anything going..."

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"SHE WAS VITAL..."

The story of New Order's fabled American promoter, Ruth Polsky

A LEGENDARY figure in New York post-punk circles, Ruth Polsky was crucial to New Order's early American breakthrough around the release of Movement. “She was vital, absolutely vital," says Peter Hook. "Her vision, her love for English indie music, is the reason we're all still big in America today. It was her that championed English music in New York, and that gateway opened up the whole of America. Not just us. A lot of bands from that period, their first taste of America came via Ruth Polsky."

A sometime music journalist and band manager, Polsky booked bands for Manhattan nightclubs Hurrah and Danceteria between 1979 and 1986. Besides New Order she also secured early American breaks for The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Psychedelic Furs, The Sisters Of Mercy, The Jesus And Mary Chain and many more. Parties at her West Houston Street apartment were famously starry, druggy affairs. "The first person ever to give me cocaine was Ruth Polsky," Hook says. "I blew it all over the floor. Woody Allen-style."

Tragically, Polsky died aged 31. On September 7, 1986, as she stood in line outside an early Aids benefit concert at the Limelight Club, a taxi crashed and bounced onto the pavement, crushing her. New Order were one of many bands who paid their respects, playing a tribute show at the Roxy in December, with proceeds going to Polsky's family. Their set included "Atmosphere" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" for the first time since Joy Division.

“The reason she died is because she wanted to make a statement," says Hook, who had a relationship with Polsky. "She'd never paid to get into a gig in her life, but she wanted to make sure she was seen to be paying for this Aids benefit. Knowing Ruth as well as I did, I don't think she would have liked to have died in the queue to pay. She'd have preferred the VIP section. Life is full of ironies."

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"MARINETTI WOULD LOVE NEW ORDER!"

Peter Saville on his iconic sleeve design for Movement

"WHY was packaging important to us?" Factory Records boss Tony Wilson once mused. "Because the job was a sacred one.”

Peter Saville's classic sleeve design for New Order's Movement album, much like the music within, marked the band's shift from monochrome to colour. It is closely based on a 1932 exhibition poster by the Italian Futurist artist Fortunato Depero, who specialised in vivid kinetic typography. Saville created a range of related designs for New Order's "Ceremony" and “Procession" singles, also released in 1981.

Launched by poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti with a 1909 manifesto, the multimedia Futurist movement celebrated speed, technology, transport, urbanism and modernity, often with an undercurrent of violence. Initially avant-garde and progressive, it was later tainted by Marinetti's embrace of Mussolini and fascism. Saville chose Depero's source design in consultation with Hook, adapting the original to include a graphic F for Factory and an L denoting the Roman numeral 50, an allusion to the album's catalogue number, FACT50.

"I had a developing awareness and interest in the Futurist movement around that time," says Saville tells Uncut. “I shared this feeling with Rob Gretton and the group when they were in London recording the album. "Obviously there was an immediate synergy with their proposed title and also the essence of their emergent sound. I remember thinking that Marinetti would love New Order!"

INSIDE MOVEMENT

An exclusive sneak preview of New Order's forthcoming boxset, Movement - The Definitive Edition

MOVEMENT has long been regarded as New Order's transitional album, a rebirth following the tragic end of Joy Division. Even its creators have mixed feelings about it almost 40 years later. Peter Hook calls Movement "Joy Division with New Order vocals"; Bernard Sumner, "the faltering steps of an infant".

But in its newly expanded boxset, Movement unquestionably gains in stature and significance. A raw demo version of the album, recorded at Cargo studios in Rochdale but never released before, captures some of the tougher punk edge the band was always pushing for against the wishes of producer Martin Hannett. "What was interesting to me was there's another version of Movement which is just demos," says Stephen Morris. "Not vastly different from what we ended up with, but there was no Hannett-induced torture involved."

More satisfying is the broader context the boxset brings to this uncertain, experimental chapter in New Order's history. The album package and its four accompanying 12-inch single reissues show that the band were already developing their electronic direction on tracks like “Procession", “Hurt", "Everything's Gone Green” and "Temptation". Several futuristic, forward-looking tracks were excluded from the album, largely because of New Order's principled commitment to standalone singles.

"If we hadn't been quite so political about it. Movement could have ended up a very different album," Morris nods. "Because Everything's Gone Green' wasn't on Movement, or 'Hurt'. There were synths just two stops along, and if we'd included all those tracks Movement would have been quite different. But as it is. Movement is just a snapshot of a few months of our lives.”

The boxset's additional audio and DVD discs also contain some electrifying early live performances spanning 1981 to 1983, including the embryonic New Order's New York debut at Hurrah on September 27, 1980, with all three founder members sharing vocals. Though wildly erratic, these shows have a ragged, drunken, explosive energy that feels punk both in sound and spirit. There is also a session at the city's Peppermint Lounge from 1981, TV sessions from Granada Studios in 1981 and BBC Riverside the following year.

Along with Stephen Morris and the band's co-manager Andy Robinson, Peter Hook was a key driving force behind the boxset and hopes it will be the first of many expanded New Order reissues.

"I think it'll make a great series," Hook says, “Whether you like it or not, whether Barney likes it or not, I think Movement was a very important record. Not only in our history, in a lot of people's histories."

But since their recent court case, Hook and the current New Order lineup no longer communicate directly. This, he admits, makes joint retrospective projects like this more difficult "With all we’ve achieved, we should be able to shake hands on the street and say, 'Fucking hell, didn't we have a great ride? " Hook sighs. "'Haven't we done well?' But that's the saddest thing, you can't do that."

Movement- The Definitive Edition is out March 29 on Warner Music