1993 09 New Order Select

the hook, the chief, the wife and her drummer

From melancholy sophisticates to disco evangelists and beyond, they've dominated British pop like no other band. Yet their mystery remains. On the eve of a Reading rebirth, we ask... just who are New Order?

story by MIRANDA SAWYER

photos by NEIL COOPER

NEW ORDER SIT AT A cloth-covered table on the airy bar de terrasse of the Montreux Palace Hotel. To one side of them a film crew buzz discreetly about their business. Above, the pot plants gently sizzle amid the TV lights. Across the road the neon sign of Hazyland ("Dancing CLUB... DANCING club") has just been lit. It's 9.30pm. Just beyond Hazyland, Lake Geneva, huge and silent, flickers in the blurry moonlight. 

The bar is deserted apart from the TV corner, where Stephen Morris, Gillian Gilbert, Bernard Sumner and Peter "Hooky" Hook - surrounded by 20 or so crew and hangers-on - lounge in various states of drunken diffidence. Paul Morley sits opposite. He is interviewing the group for a documentary about them. Taller, thinner and edgier than he appears on TV, Morley's airy casualness belies a determination to niggle out the real story. But it's a tricky task. The band keep straying from the questions - "I don't tell the truth," says an indignant Gillian at one point - taking the piss. And they will bicker. 

"It could be conceived," Stephen is saying, "that the Hacienda is the one thing that binds us together. It's what we've got in common..." 

"Well, we're all equally at odds with one another about it," Hooky qualifies.

"I've had some of the best nights of my life there," says Bernard. "But I was living in a council flat while we were putting £10,000 a week into the Hacienda. That's wrong."

Hooky: "£10,000 a month." 

Gillian: "Ooh, I bet you feel better about it now."

Stephen: "On the opening night of the Hacienda I had to pay to get in. It took me nine years to get a free drink..."

Bernard: "If you went more often they'd know who you were."

Hooky: "Still, nobody makes the same mistake twice..."

Bernard: "We did. We bought a bar (Dry 201 in Manchester). Yes, many's the time we've rolled about on the floor about that. We've had a lot of laughs about that one."

And Stephen suddenly points at Hazyland. 

"Shall we buy it?" he asks Hooky. "By your logic, then we can go in there whenever we want, wearing whatever we want..."

NEW ORDER, RUNS THE MYTH OF 16 YEARS STANDING, are awkward sods. Suspicious of journalists, slippery in interviews, obsessive about photo approval, sarky, uncompromising, elusive, grumpy. Awkward. Admittedly, in the four years since 'Technique' they've had their fair share of reasons to be churlish. The well-told tale runs something like this. Three potentially permanent solo projects ("We never thought we'd get back together again afterwards" - Gillian) followed by death and violence leading to the Hacienda's closure; money worries; LP traumas ('Republic' recorded in "an atmosphere of impending doom"); and finally Factory's collapse and a move to London Records. Plenty to whinge about there. And New Order have never resisted the call of the grumble. Indeed, the ever-wry comments of The Other Two have recently become so bitter that a final split has seemed more than a safe bet.

But seeing them together, tipsy and relaxed, the sniping and teasing take on a subtler tone. It's clear that they relish arguing. Their little digs and jokes keep outsiders away...

"Keep talking," says Bernard, "then Paul won't be able to get a question in." And the sly insults create a laidback clannishness that Morley finds almost impossible to shake. To his credit, he does his best - What do you think about Revenge, Stephen? What do you like about Bernard, Gillian? But they fudge their answers. There are unspoken rules that which New Order do not break,

"We don't step on each other's toes in public," says Barney. "It's confrontational."

AFTER THE INTERVIEW, THE BAND AND THEIR MANAGER Rob Gretton - a large, mellow, bullet-headed man with "a breast implant in his stomach" (Barney) - gather round another table to have a meeting. The Select photographer tries to take some pictures. Hooky throws a packet of cigarettes at him.

New Order are here, strangely, for the 37th Montreux Jazz Festival. They'll precede Robert Plant at tomorrow's MTV-sponsored opening night. Bernard says he wouldn't have agreed to perform if he'd known the gig was essentially for television. He thinks a recording - in whatever form - is a recording, and live is live, and that you shouldn't mix the two. Still, they're here now, so they may as well make the most of it. Perhaps inevitably, someone suggests a trip to Hazyland,

Hooky, as is his habit, has disappeared without telling anyone (pausing only to nick Barney's key in case he needs to pay the bar bill) but Bernard, Rob, Gillian and a vivaciously drunken Stephen, plus four crew and Jim Swindell (the head of New Order's US recording company) all totter towards Montreux's hottest niterie. On entering they double the number of Hazyland punters, who, as a type, fall somewhere between Benny from Abba and George from Rainbow; beards and a smile so naively friendly you feel compelled to steal their drink. (Not that anyone does, Jim covers the club tab and is $350 lighter by the end of the evening.)

Stephen and Gillian are in fine fettle, bellowing along to Whitney Houston, accepting a bet to smooch to Queen. Stephen even dances to 'Losing My Religion' Barney watches from the bar.

"Steve always dances the same," he sniggers. "With his arm like this. Even when he's E-ing." And he jerks his right elbow upwards and earwards in a Michael Stipe-style twitch. It's quite an impression.

There's something of the mad professor in Steve. His nervous energy gives him a spiky, adolescent walk; his black parka billows out behind him like a headmaster's gown. He never seems to relax completely, always reacting to people around him and unable to resist a wisecrack. You know about Hooky's easy friendliness, Barney's petulance and disarming charm, even Gillian's quiet irony (though not for her infectious giggling). But Stephen's barbed wit comes as a complete surprise.

At the moment the surprise is that Jacko, New Order's long-standing soundman, is not lying in a crumpled heap outside the front door. He's graduated from dancing with the Bennys to grooving a la Gascoigne on top of the cigarette machine.

THE NEXT DAY, HOOKY, GILLIAN AND STEPHEN TROOP OFF to the all-new Auditorium Stravinsky to sound-check. Bernard refuses to go when he's meant to.

"I'm bored of playing," he remarks evenly. "I'll go later. I'm so bored now that when I have to soundcheck my guitar solo I only play the beginning and the end of it."

He's laughing when he says it, but Bernard doesn't do what he doesn't want to. He's always been the same, he says - he only got two O-levels, Art and English. "I can only excel at something that I 'm interested in. I can't make myself do something that I don't like. I can't knuckle under."

So instead of soundchecking, he has a vegetarian lasagne in a nearby cafe. Despite his near total abstinence last night - only one or two beers between Perriers - Barney is suffering this morning. He's always reacted hadly to drink, "even when I was 16". Something in alcohol causes his skin to go brown after drinking, and he gets the worst hangovers of anyone he knows.

Mind you, he's tested his tolerance in the past. Though his weeknights would be fairly drink-free, his long-standing Saturday routine was to cane it all night, come home at 8.30am Sunday and throw up till half past five. Every week.

"1 just couldn't see the point of drinking if you weren't going to get drunk."

Once he went to see 808 State with his girlfriend Sarah and some friends. He never saw the group play a note, but subsequently found himself in bed with his £70 shirt, and £90 jeans ripped to shreds and covered in blood. He'd lost a £150 jacket with £100 cash inside in the process of getting home (he vaguely remembered being sick in someone's car) and, by the devastating evidence, he'd got into his house by throwing a brick through the conservatory, thereby setting off the burglar alarm and bringing in the police. He awoke to find Sarah, perhaps understandably, flinging shoes at his head.

So now he's on a health kick. No exercise or anything, but he's avoiding sugar, trying to stick to white wine and Perrier "and not going where there's a party. I just can't control my partying".

Bernard is the leader of New Order. Not just because he's the singer, the one people most want to interview or photograph; not because, according to their engineer Michael Johnson "most of the ideas come from Barney"; not even because he's the most paranoid of the four (though that comes into it). It's because in a quartet of wilful personalities, Bernard's is the most wilful. It's wrapped around him. He's boyish, endearing ("I don't think the others would agree with you on that one") and incredibly softly spoken, but he is in control.

"I think I was more endearing when I was little," he murmurs. "Because life toughens you up. It teaches you that sometimes to sort people out you have to be a twat. You know, business-wise, if you're nice all the time, people view that as a weakness. I think you've got to be a bit of a twat to be a lead singer really. To be a fully fledged, all-the-medals lead singer. It's difficult. You need a certain swell-headedness. I've grown to fit the job, but unfortunately the job's grown as well."

Did you get what you wanted as a child?

"Well, I'm an only child, so I think I did a bit... I used to get all the chocolate I wanted, but we didn't have a lot of money."

Barney was born on January 4, 1956 and grew up with his mum Laura and his grandparents in a two-up-two-down in Salford. He has never known his dad. When his mum married, he changed his name with her to Dicken, but later changed it back.

"A story in itself," he remarks cryptically. "I don't talk about stuff that's private to me."

All three of his family are dead now, his mum last year and his granny a month ago.

“It sounds like a bloody tragedy but there’s always been a lot of physical illness in me family, so it was kind of a relief. It’s liberating, sort of... That’s why I started talking about drugs in interviews. But Gillian’s mum read it so I’m not going to any more. And I don’t approve of drugs anyway.”

The young Bernard was lonely. He wanted a dog, but his mum was a cleanliness freak, “a bit of a Howard Hughes”, and wouldn’t have books and newspapers in the house for fear of paper bugs, so a parasite-ridden mutt was out of the question. Barney ended up with a budgie, a goldfish and his comics and schoolbooks in his bedroom.

He “absolutely fucking hated” school. He went to Salford Boys’ Grammar where he hung around with Hooky (they’ve known each other for 26 years now) and the school bully Baz Benson. Barney and Baz met up again recently for the first time in years. It was a raucous reunion: the evening ended with Baz being thrown out of the pub for pinching the barmaid’s bum - a bit embarrassing for Barney as the bouncer doing the chucking a) works at The Hacienda, and b) is going out with said barmaid.

Schooldays were spent wagging it and shoplifting in town; hanging around Salford Girls’ Grammar (Barney lost his virginity to the “affectionately named” Shagger Sheila at the age of 13); drawing and painting - “I loved it and I was good at it. I’d go off into some other space, me brainwaves would change” - and avoiding Jonny Barclay, the maths teacher. Both Bernard and Hooky on separate occasions tell the following story about Barclay, and it’s clear that somewhere inside Barney he still can’t believe the injustice of it.

Jonny Barclay was an old style maths teacher, a bit wild, prone to “Hitler punishments”, but easily distracted if you got him ranting about the war or cricket. Hooky and Bernard never did their homework - they would drag the class swot into the toilets and copy his - but having been caught and slippered once, Barney resolved to start doing it. He was crap at maths (the worst ever in the school, said Barclay) but he stayed in all night and did it.

“I did it, right, I did it. And he fucking slippered me! Because he wouldn’t believe I’d done it. He thought I’d copied off somebody. That’s terrible innit?” Barney shakes his head in disbelief.

An hour and a half later than the rest of New Order, Bernard joins them for the soundcheck. The ’93 Montreux Festival is the first event to be held in the new Auditorium Stravinsky, a sterile pine-panelled hall with balcony and special front-stage area for TV cameras. Barney is efficient and quick in rehearsal, stopping tunes when he’s had enough, cutting things short when they’re wrong. “What’s that other we’re doing? What’s it called?” he asks. Gillian sits down; Hooky lies on his back with one leg in the air. Time for a quick New Order history.

When Bernard left school at 16 his mum got him a job in the Manchester City Treasury. It was everything he didn’t want - people dying a desk-bound death - so he left and worked for four years at an animation company. John Squire of The Stone Roses later did Barney’s job. It was while colouring in 200 cartoon cells a day that Bernard got into music: “We listened to weird stuff all day - spaghetti western soundtracks, Clockwork Orange...”

In 1977, when he and Hooky (a conveyancing clerk at the time) were 21, they saw the Sex Pistols at the Free Trade Hall. Hooky’s got the ticket at home - it cost 50p. The band were shit, but they looked like they were having a laugh, so Hooky invested in a bass (Bernard had a guitar) and they both bought books: Palmer Hughes’ Book Of Bass (Hooky’s still got it) and How To Play A Guitar.

An advert for a singer in a Manchester music shop led to a series of strange responses - “fucking nutters” says Barney (including one who played the balalaika) - so when Ian Curtis phoned they gave him the job without hearing him sing. They’d met him at gigs, he had HATE written on the back of his flak jacket, and they thought he was alright.

“We weren’t really bothered if someone could play or not, we just thought, Are they a laugh?” says Barney. A few drummers later, Steve turned up through an advert in a shop in Macclesfield.

Warsaw (as were) rehearsed three times a week in a warehouse called TJ Davidson’s round the corner from the Hacienda-to-be. A lot of other bands rehearsed there, which got on Warsaw’s nerves, so they drilled a hole in the floor and pissed on the drum kit of the band below. Lucky Buzzcocks. They also used to lower things like toilets out of their window and swing them in through the one below.

Hooky still can’t recall playing their first gig, he was so nervous, but it was at the Electric Circus, supporting the Buzzcocks. The one that really kicked the band in, though, was at a Stiff night in Rafters, a showcase of nine local punk bands. Paul Morley’s group The Negatives were playing. Barney remembers Ian Curtis losing his rag and booting a door off its hinges because, through mucking about by The Negatives, it looked like the club was going to close before Joy Division went on.

“They all fucking shot off and got onstage double quick after that.”

That night was the first time that 17-year-old Gillian Gilbert saw Joy Division play, though she’d met them before, in TJ Davidsons. Rob Gretton saw them that night too, and bumped into Barney coming out of a phone box the next day. He asked if he could manage them and turned up at the next Sunday rehearsal. They went to the pub to discuss it. No one bought Rob a drink, but he stayed anyway. After Ian died, it was Rob that suggested the name New Order (from “The People’s New Order Of Kampuchea” in a Guardian piece - no Nazi intent) and who suggested Gillian as a fourth member. The Hacienda and Dry Bar were his ideas too.

Barney: “I’m glad we didn’t buy him a drink now, heheh.”

SOUNDCHECK OVER, GILLIAN AND STEVE GO FOR A MEAL. Bernard disappears to explore Montreux and Hooky strips down to saucy leopard-print trunk-ettes to catch the rays at the lakeside pool. The only member of New Order sans pallor de Mancinis, Hooky’s looking a lot trimmer these days.

“I’ve lost a lot of weight. Separation does that for you.” He recently split up with his girlfriend Jane, a likeable, no-nonsense guitar roadie, who’s actually looking after his bass on this tour. It must be difficult for them. Hooky left his wife for her.

“I don’t know,” he muses. “Love’s a strange thing innit? You think you were in love with somebody and then you think, Fucking hell, no way I was, no way. I’ve moved on, I suppose the first time I was in love was with Jane really. Totally.”

Something about Peter Hook is completely decent. Despite his meat-head rock-pig reputation, he’s by far the most sentimental (he likes wallowing in old records) and easy-going of the group, and the sort of person to whom others turn. When Primal Scream were worried about their manager Alex Nightingale’s excesses, they asked Hooky to talk to him. He’ll do anything for a friend, but tells riotous tales of his humiliation of those he considers wankers: “Rob taught me to be fair.”

As he lies in the sun, pulling on a menthol fag (he only started smoking two years ago), a helicopter circles above, weaving round the stupidly pretty chalets, swooping down to the dazzling lake. It belongs to Claude Nobs who runs the festival, and in it is the normally aerophobic Quincy Jones. Quincy’s here to introduce New Order tonight. He owns Qwest, the US record company to which New Order signed in February 1985, and their appearance in Montreux is partly due to his asking them to come. New Order might have copped a helicopter spin, but they’ve got to leave tomorrow. Jim Swindell suggests a boat trip instead. But Hooky doesn’t like boats. He can’t swim.

He strides about, Hooky, and you think he'd be quite good at sports, but he wasn’t at school, and he still harbours a vague resentment towards those he thinks are athletic. The one thing he used to enjoy was cross-country running. Once he ran a race and came 91st. He handed in his card to a steward...and the next day was hauled up in assembly for cheating. In front of the whole school.

“They said I’d tried to pass myself off as coming in 16th, but I didn’t. The twat who filled in the form turned the card upside down.”

It’s 11pm. Robert Plant and his hoary, hairy mates are creaking it up downstairs. New Order have had a strange gig. Quincy Jones introduced them: “Send a lot of love out to those mad men and women from Madchester...” and for an hour the Auditorium Stravinsky dutifully tapped its foot and wiggled in its seat, as New Order stropped and slouched through their second gig since 1989.

They were fine - ‘Regret’ (dodgy in rehearsal), ‘Everyone Everywhere’, ‘Temptation’ and ‘Perfect Kiss’ all clear and coldly beautiful, but the gliding TV cameras and polite “jazz” crowd made for an unreal, emotionless atmosphere.

Backstage, Quincy is sat on a folding bed talking to Barney about gangs. Dressed in black with two checkered scarves around his neck, compact and chummy, he laughs a lot and suddenly lies back full-length on the bed. Blimey. Quincy’s pissed. Let’s get a few words from him about New Order.

“Earlier we were talking about a guy that I admire very much who’s like one of the genius scientists of Silicon Valley, and he said something that was very beautiful. He said his work will go on forever because it gets involved in romance. Which means fun, excitement, creativity and advancing civilisation. And that covers what New Order are about too. Romance is the word. We all have a right to believe that things are gonna help each other’s children, whether we can do anything about it or not. We’re gonna keep trying. All my life I’ve tried and I know these guys have too. They’re beautiful.”

Next door champagne is being guzzled. Hooky’s recovered his form and goes to check out Robert Plant. Bernard, staggering a little, his eyes round and shiny, announces, “You can never drink too much,” and then decides he’d better go to bed.

Rob has found out about a post-gig MTV do with free drinks. So off we go, Stephen finding Gillian and bounding off partywards. A fan stops them on the step of the auditorium. He kisses Gillian continental style, three times on the cheek.

“Oh fine,” shouts Steve after him. “Two in Italy, three in Switzerland. Don’t mind me. Come again, we’ll be glad to see you. Bring your dog next time. No, fine.”

The MTV party is in full flow - unlike the free drink, which seems to have dried up. Someone says you have to jam for a freebie. Within seconds, Steve is behind the drums in a comer. A curly-topped bloke is being serious on the bass, crouching down to time up, fingering a few blues riffs. “No, no, no,” grumbles his beardie mate. “I vill play the drums. You play too loud. Ve need a guitarist.” Steve bounds over to his girlfriend.

“Come on, come on,” he insists. “We'll do ‘Tasty Fish’,” and zips back to his position.

“On guitar?” wonders Gillian to no one in particular.

The next day, Rex, one of the crew, wakes up to find himself lying on some pebbles by Lake Geneva. Beside him is a splashy pile of vomit. People are walking to work and having to step over his legs. By the coach which will take us to the airport, Bernard’s suitcase is sagged open, his clothes on the pavement. He can’t find his passport. When he finally slumps in, hair vertical, aspect horizontal, someone asks him if he wants a drink. “Fuck off,” says Barney and goes to sleep.

We’re flying to Copenhagen for the Roskilde Festival. New Order appear at lam tomorrow, after Anthrax, Suicidal Tendencies and Midnight Oil. When we arrive at 1pm, Hooky falls over his trolley and lands flat on the wet tarmac. “I’m pissed,” he says happily.

Stephen was ill on the plane. He turned a newspaper-grey colour, muttered something about everything going white and passed out. Then he threw up, neatly, into the sick bag provided.

Illness dogged Steve’s younger years. He would “just warp off and black out” every week, usually in school. It was eventually diagnosed as a result of claustrophobia and vertigo. Bom in October 1957, he was about six when it started. The first time it happened he was singing hymns in assembly when he went blind. He stammered through the hymn, fumbled his way to a teacher and collapsed.

“The next thing I remember is everything went white and everybody was sort of blue, like the Bizarro men in Superman comics, all dead angular, a bit like aliens but with this weird blue light on them. They didn’t look like proper people to me.”

His worst attack occurred when his dad took him to see England play Scotland. He shudders to recall it: “It was really intense, all these people, really crowded. And I turned into a two-dimensional thing. I turned into a piece of paper. It’s indescribable. It gives me the willies just thinking about it. It wasn’t like I was squashed, it was like I’d always been a piece of paper. And everybody else was as well.”

He was sent to a therapist, and, when he was eleven, to a hypnotist who cured him. But it took three years, and by then Steve had got a reputation at school for being a loony. He was at King’s College Grammar School in Macclesfield, a well-off, rugby-playing establishment, so he decided to live up to his weirdo reputation.

He was expelled at 14.

The people he’d been knocking around with were older - they listened to “progressive” music and took acid. One day one of them decided it would be cool to tell his mum and dad.

“Like, Mam, I’ve just taken some acid. Very trendy.” A full-scale investigation resulted, the CID were brought in and Stephen’s presence was no longer required at King’s Macc.

“They found The Politics Of Ecstasy by Timothy Leary in me bag.”

Steve, like Bernard and Hooky, has a tale of unfair treatment in school. He had been due for the year prize in Latin, Greek and Classical Mythology, but in the acid-aftermath they gave it to the boy who came second. Not that Steve cared much. He was happy being “a pretentious bastard” in a brown leather maxi-coat, who went to gigs in Manchester and got the last train back. Trouble was, the last bus from the train station often didn’t stop, so he would end up stranded in Alderley Edge, five miles from home. He used to stay overnight in the Devil’s Caves there and come spooking round the farm in the morning for some food. At 16, he and some friends formed a band - The Sunshine Valley Band.

“We had sunbed glasses and we used to jump up and down on a table screaming, I am surrounded.”

Influenced by the Velvet Underground and Albert Camus, though none of them could actually play, The Sunshine Valley Band split up. The others decided that a good education was more important and Steve’s best mate started chasing a girl from Prestbury. Steve carried on by himself, phoning bomb threats into private schools for girls and daubing things on walls, drumming in his dad’s bedroom. Then he answered the Warsaw advert for a drummer. He borrowed his mum’s car, and he and Ian met Barney and Hooky outside Strangeways. Steve thought that Hooky was Barney’s dad.

Gillian and Steve make a sweet couple: he carries her bag for her, and when they’re drunk their sense of humour is identical. Her body language is muted compared to the rest of the band - but her quiet one-liners and ironic rolling of the eyes often form the full stop to what the others are talking about.

Gillian was born on January 27, 1961 and grew up on the same street in Macclesfield as Steve, though they never met. The oldest of three girls, she was shy and quiet, good at art, “in my own little world really”. She transferred to the girls’ grammar school in the sixth form and felt very alienated. In her mid-teens, at her other school, she and her sister were hiring coaches and organising trips to go and see bands in Manchester, like The Stranglers - which didn’t go down well in a school groomed for the golf-club wifelet. And she was in a band.

“Me sister and her friend phoned the Macclesfield Express and said we wanted to be in a punk group. It was big headlines and we got all these phone calls and just got stared at even more really.”

The only girl who didn’t stare was Stephen’s younger sister Amanda, who told Gillian about her weird brother and “his tank top obsession”. Gillian, her sister and friend joined The Inadequates, who practised in TJ Davidson’s, next door to Joy Division. She recalls the first time she met Steve: “I thought he was really nice. He had a cheesecloth shirt on.” Steve and Ian would give them lifts home.

Gillian’s still on a three-month trial with New Order. They’ve never told her whether she was in or not. She could hardly play when she started, but Bamey helped her a lot. Now she and Steve have a recording studio in their farm in Macclesfield (Gillian’s mum does the garden). They’d like to have children (Barney and Hooky have) but it would be such a big thing if they did. What would happen to New Order?

Gilliam: “It really does dominate your life. I’m finding it a bit of a problem now... it ’s ten years and you just carry on what you’re doing and you don't seem to have any other life.”

Steve: “That’s why I stopped analysing things really. Because me and Gillian, we’re in the band together and we’re surrounded by the same things and when you go home you talk about the same things all the time. We were just spending all our time talking about New Order and you go out and you do New Order and you come home and you talk about New Order... So I stopped worrying about it.”

Gillian: “Nobody realises it. They’re not in the same position as us. But we'll see what happens.”

The view from the stage at Roskilde resembles a medieval battle. About 80,000 robust Danes, clad in war dress of towelling head-bands and cap-sleeved T-shirts stretch as far as you can see in every direction into the damp darkness. The night sky is clouded and swirling. And everywhere you look there are flags. Stuck on top of 20-foot poles, whipping in the wind, the pennants announce their bearers’ allegiances: a ‘Screamadelica’ sun; a marijuana leaf on green; a black razor blade; a blue duck on a multi-hued tie-dye swirl. And the best we can come up with at Glastonbury is binbag hats...

New Order are bludgeoning the army before them into arms-up submission. Despite some technical hitches they are a triumph, uplifting and exhilarating. Hooky stumbling and strutting, all threats and grins; Barney’s laconic insolence remaining even when he says, “I love you, I love the lot of you”; Gillian allowing herself a smile of glee; and Steve, a total madman, laughing at the audience singing along to the instrumental breaks in ‘Temptation’. The songs scar out into the night, transporting the crowd who thump and clap and jump as us Brits never do. They’re delirious, completely hilarious. They make you laugh out loud.

Later, in a chilly Portacabin backstage, Bernard considers New Order’s awkwardness. Steve and Gillian are drinking elsewhere. Hooky has disappeared, last seen gamboling in the direction of the rave tent and the fire fields. Barney’s talking about his grandad, whom he really respected, and how he kept war paraphernalia in the backroom.

“When I was a kid there was loads of talk about the war and it left a big impression on me. A lot of things about this society had been formed before I was even born that I didn’t like. I wasn’t going to have some fucking snotty teacher telling me what to do, what I should do after his generation had been through a war. I thought, maybe it’s better if you don’t think the way they think and that you’re original, follow your own nose and just do what your heart tells you. Don’t listen to an older generation. Don’t give them respect.”

Bernard is 37. New Order are 16. Respect, as Stephen tells us in his best Normski, is due. 

■ Paul Morley’s New Order documentary will be shown on ITV on August 29 at 11.15pm

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SIDEBARS

the bill wyman of new order!

Total recall! Come follow memory man Stephen Morris for an exhaustive wallow through the history of New Order...

■ CEREMONY February 1981 

The last of Joy Division: Martin Hannett produces, Bernard Albrecht (as was) adopts Ian Curtis voice. Frosty, taut, immensely moving elegy for Curtis.

“‘Ceremony’ and ‘In A Lonely Place' (B-side) were the last songs we wrote with Ian, but we couldn’t find the lyrics after he'd passed on. We had to work ’em out from a live tape, so they might be completely wrong. We did two versions: one in a weird studio in Orange County in America with this mad engineer who went on about 'Nam all the time, and one in Manchester, with Gillian on it. I find the early stuff hard to listen to. And I always thought ‘Ceremony’ went on too long... ’

■ MOVEMENT November 1981 

First LP proves tough going. Ludicrous ‘New Order And Their Disgraceful Nazi Name ’ furore in pop journals. Band now up to strength with Stephen's girlfriend Gillian Gilbert on colour-coded keyboards... 

“It was Rob’s idea to get Gillian in but she was so obvious that you wouldn’t even think of asking her -her band The Inadequates used to practise down the road. We got them to store their gear in our room so we could secretly use it at gigs... Martin was acting weird round then because he’d created a sound with Joy Division, and he felt we’d be better off producing ourselves. But I heard ‘Movement’ again on CD recently and there’s all this stuff I’d forgotten about. Like on 'Chosen Time’, they’d all gone to the chippy and left me and Martin, so we went, Let’s do some overdubs! Yeahl ‘Trout Mask Replica'! The rest of them didn't notice, and I’d forgotten meself until now.”

■ EVERYTHING’S GONE GREEN September 1981 and TEMPTATION May 1982

Scary death disco opus with depersonalised “Seems like I’ve been here before” refrain signals Hannett's departure. JD purists' unease confirmed by ‘Temptation' - majestic pop symphony of rejection. 

“Martin always had very strong ideas but he wouldn’t communicate them directly. He’d make me do things over and over where I couldn’t see why. I'd say, What's wrong with that one, then? And he’s going, Do it again, only more cocktail party-like! Whaat? It was almost a Zen thing. You’d be so puzzled about what he wanted that you’d do it right without knowing why."

■ BLUE MONDAY March 1983

New discomatic New Order go global with epochal biggest-selling 12-inch ever. Myths: song written so NO could find out how new drum machine worked (true), co-produced with Kraftwerk (false), made entirely on acid according to Bernard (Stephen: “If it was, how can he remember it?). Pointless remix by Quincy Jones in 1988, but let's not get into that now.

“First proper drum machine! This was our ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ or ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’... It was conceived as a jape on the audience. Right, we’ll write this song that plays itself, so we can go offstage and see if anybody notices. We used to do 20-minute versions of it just by not turning the machines off. You can’t do that with the gear you get now, y’know, but the Mickey Mouse stuff we had then, repetition was its forte. The song was supposed to have mechanical vocals on it too. I spent ages programming the fucking vocals into this speech synthesiser whatsit: (adopts Dalek voice) How. DOES IT. FEE-UL? But when we came to mix it the fucking engineer had wiped it... ”

■ POWER, CORRUPTION AND LIES May 1983

Features three of ‘BM"s half-sisters written in similar what-does-this-button-do? style, and exemplary shagging song and Great Lost Single ‘Age Of Consent' which reveals Bernard to be ladies man on the sly.

“It was just freezing bleedin’ cold in Britannia Row Studios. You’d be all wrapped up in three coats and you’d nod off, and then the heating’d come on at 5am and you'd wake up sweating... Oh God, I’ve got to do some drumming! ‘Your Silent Face’ was Bernard doing his Kraftwerk record, ‘Age Of Consent’ was in the tradition of ‘Transmission’ and ‘Ecstasy’ and ‘586’ were in the same vein as ‘Blue Monday’ - real cop-outs, Let’s use a vocoder and not have any lyrics...”

■ CONFUSION August 1983 and THIEVES LIKE US April 1984

Amid flurry of Hawaiian shirts and It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum shorts, NO decamp to New York to meet feted electroproducer Arthur Baker. Result (‘Confusion') later adjudged to be aptly titled...

“We’d got into Arthur Baker’s records, all this music that was a hybrid of Kraftwerk and early hip hop, like Planet Patrol, and he really liked 'Blue Monday’, so y'know, great, let’s make a record! But he stuck us in this demo studio for a week and didn't like anything we came up with. We were trying to do ‘Planet Rock’, and he was expecting ‘Blue Monday’... Mostly we just went to these Puerto Rican hip hop clubs like The Funhouse where they were all breakdancing. We didn’t have a go, though. Seriously injury problem there.”

■ THE PERFECT KISS May 1985

NO now wrongly perceived as one-single-a-year gentlefolk of leisure. 'Low-Life's epic single scales new heights of complexity, featuring heavy metal synths, Wagnerian string motifs, Copacabana cross-rhythms, Dr Who spacey zooms and a choms of frogs.

“People say, Why did Bernard always write these songs that have dirty great fuck-off endings? Well, because nobody else did. Orchestrated disco with a bit of passion behind it was a bit unique, really. It was planned that it would get bigger and more grand as it went on. At the end we wanted to have Elmer Fudd going ‘Th-th-th-that's all, folks!' but Warner Bros wanted a phenomenal amount of money. So we drafted in a Firepower pinball machine instead. The frogs were mine, like the sheep on ‘Fine Time’. After that fucking robot singer thing on ‘Blue Monday’ I prefer the animal species. They’re better to work with.”

■ LOWLIFE May 1985, SUB-CULTURE October 1985 and SHELLSHOCK March 1986 

Band swipe title of most accomplished LP so far from Spectator dipsocolumnist Jeffrey Bernard and include vocal sample of him (“I am one of the people who live what's called the low life") on ‘This Time Of Night'. JB miffed, tries to sue: band submit, remove sample. 'Low-Life' unites NO's proto-techno and fuck-off rock 'n' roll traditions as never before.

“ ‘Love Vigilantes’ is brilliant - it was the first thing we did and it was a great start. We just thought, Let’s do a record with a mouth-organ in! (Slips into Bob Mortimer voice) That was my idea... It was so quick and we were amazed. Wow, it’s a proper song! The original ‘Elegia’ was about 15 or 20 minutes long - the LP version is the edited highlights. We did it for Dylan Jones at i-D and these Japanese film people and it took all fuckin’ night. A bit Philip Glass, it was - Gillian's always liked him. It had vocals from these two lads who'd wandered in on their way to school, going ‘ My name's Justin.' 'And my name's Ben', over and over. Very arty.”

■ STATE OF THE NATION August 1986, BROTHERHOOD October 1986, BIZARRE LOVE TRIANGLE November 1986 

Mid-term burn-out. Perfunctory electro-funker ‘SOTN’ sports handy bassline but worst rhymes ever (“State of the nation/our salvation/deprivation") and ‘Brotherhood' is all sharpened wreckage and noise. But ‘BL T is A Great New Order Disco Moment.

“Our first visit to Japan was this nightmare fortnight... four gigs, one of them filmed for a video (the cryptically-entitled ‘Pumped Full Of Drugs'), plus we were going to edit the video and write, record and mix two new tracks. And do loads of press. I was doing a video diary for Channel 4 and you could see everybody disintegrating, tempers fraying. Nobody in the studio could speak English and they thought we could show them the secrets of the western sound. ‘State Of The Nation’ was knocked up on the spot but it was a right waste of time. 'Brotherhood' turned out the least satisfactory LP, not cos the songs aren’t there, but cos it was all murky. We did some of it at Amazon in Liverpool with the Bunnymen in next door, so I moonlighted for them when Pete De Freitas did one of his disappearances."

■ TRUE FAITH, SUBSTANCE July 1987, TOUCHED BY THE HAND OF GOD December 1987

Mandatory-purchase greatest ‘hits' package suitably fanfared by ‘True Faith'. Enormous hit, obvious drug song. Weirdo vid featuring turtle-woman doing sign language and inflatable aliens arguing on trampolines wins BRIT award. B-side ‘1963’ (sublime bisexual Kennedy assassination parable) is another Great Lost Single. Instead release ‘Touched’ from soundtrack to Kathryn Bigelow's televangelism satire 'Salvation!'.

“We always foolishly believed that singles were singles and albums were albums, so we had all these singles you couldn’t get. Hence ‘Substance’. We did the new track to make it current with Stephen Hague. You could see bits of us in the Pet Shop Boys, so we thought he must have a bit of empathy there. Stephen was quite upset that ‘1963’ wasn’t a single too, and he was right. It was us being difficult again. Serves us right.”

■ FINE TIME December 1988, TECHNIQUE February 1989, ROUND & ROUND March 1989 

Self-inflicted ordeal of US ‘Substance' tour results in sabbatical. NO reunite a year later, absorb full benefits of acid house, go bananas in Ibiza, make best LP of the '80s. Bernard's lyrical opacity replaced by poetic honesty re impermanence of relationships and underage sex. C&W nerd John Denver successfully sues band for ‘Run''s similarity to ‘Leaving On A Jet Plane'. 

“We didn’t get much done in Ibiza at all because we spent all our time in these acid house clubs. It was 12 weeks or so with the studio bills going up and nothing getting done. That’s the way to do it! We came back with loads of drums and not much else. The studio was crap, the air conditioning sprayed dirt all over everywhere, but ‘Technique’ is still the one I’ll have the fondest memories of. It captured the spirit of the times so well. Like, ‘Mr Disco' was about the English people you meet in San Antonio, all the Club 18-30 types. ‘Y’aaright? Where yer from? I’m from Manchester too! Well I'm from Stoke actually...' You know the type...”

■ WORLD IN MOTION June 1990

See June's Select for full hellish story of drunken git footballers caning the vodka at 9am as NO and Stephen Hague tear hair out turning Tony Wilson's wheeze into a hit record. Wilson vindicated as ‘WIM‘ makes number one and England win World Cup.

“Gazza and them were only there cos they were getting a backhander and it was a mad panic all round. Keith Allen more or less saved it by being more of a drunken bastard than they were. We got to know him through Making Out, which me and Gillian did the music for, ‘cos they shot it up here in Dukinfield. We'd hear these reports from the Hacienda of some mad bloke standing at the bar without his keks on. As was the practise, whole convoys of people would go back to Bernard's for a drink and they’d be saying, Who the fuck is it? It’s Keith Allen, that mad twat! Get him round here... ’

■ REGRET April 1993, REPUBLIC May 1993, RUINED IN A DAY June 1993

Factory teetering on brink. Result: most doom-laden LP of New Order’s life. Baywatch live broadcast jape for ‘Regret’ cannot disguise pervading mood of gloom.

“ ‘Republic’ reflects its times too: for ‘Technique’ everything in the garden was rosy, but for ‘Republic’ it was bad vibes all round. The ideas didn’t translate so easily and it became disjointed. ‘Regret’ and ‘Special’ are the ones I prefer, because they were the first ones we did and we spent more time on them... Tony Wilson always used to stick his head round the door and give you some cheery bullshit when you were making an LP, but this time it was emergency meetings all the time. It was not fun. Do all this painful business stuff and then go into the studio and be entirely happy? You can’t.” 

ANDREW HARRISON

===========================================

design time

New Order’s visual collaborator and architect Peter Saville paints a picture...

"They never really said anything positive about any of their covers. But they hated ‘Low Life'!” Who would be Peter Saville, the man greeted with a chorus of “YOU UTTER BASTARD!” (or so he recalls) when he consulted New Order in a dressing room in Cambridge after the sleeve for 'Low Life’ hit the racks? They don’t know much about art, this band, but they know what they don't like...

Not since Pink Floyd and Storm Thorgesen’s Hypgnosis in the '70s has a band/designer relationship borne such nutritious and lasting eye-fruit. Peter Saville, art student who designed the sleeve for ‘The Factory Sampler’ (Factory’s first release) and then sort of ‘happened’ to become Joy Division and New Order’s visual architect over the next 14 years, is, more than anything else, the man with all the secrets.

The incredible body of flat artwork that tells the Joy Division/New Order story in unforgettable squares is all his own. Whether working as just plain Peter Saville, Peter Saville Associates (with partner Brett Wickens and photographer Trevor Key) or - as with the ‘Ruined In A Day’ 45 - as grand old ‘Art Director' over a couple of his staff at Sonicon, The Sav has had his hands on New Order’s style-rudder since day one, and he knows what it all means...

He’d not even met Joy Division when he was asked to do the sleeve for Unknown Pleasures in 1979. The band had collected some likely images and handed Saville what he calls “the little wiggly diagram”. It is a radiowave map of a dying star, or pulsar, from an astronomy encyclopaedia (“The most rhythmic black hole that’d been discovered, in fact.”). Sci-fi fans will be delighted to know that the exact same pattern crops up in the opening stages of Alien, when they’re going in to the egg planet.

“I laid it out in a way that they liked, and gained their confidence... ’ he casually remembers.

Ben Kelly (who later reupholstered the Factory building) suggested engraved steel for Love Will Tear Us Apart and Saville found the images for Closer (a load of “over the top tombstones in Northern Italy” by Bernard Pierre Wolf he saw in Zoom magazine).

“But when Ian died we had serious reservations about the whole thing. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ looks like a grave stone - which is ironic, because it isn’t - and we had an album cover at the printers with a tomb on it. Ceremony has what might've been the next Joy Division sleeve. I just thought of New Order as the same band but Ian wasn't there.

“By Movement, a process had begun whereby New Order would come along and say, Peter, what are you into this month?” That month he was into classicism. True to form, he hadn't actually heard ‘Movement’.

“One key thing to know about record sleeve designers is that you don’t often get to listen to the music. Everybody imagines you sit around for days with the record, thinking about the sleeve. Not so. ”

He’d found a book on Italian futurism - the band and manager Rob Gretton took it into a room for ten minutes, marked off two pages, and said. This is the single, this is the album. He had till the end of the week to finish it.

“I’d begun to develop a conscience about recycling things, because at that stage in my career, people were beginning to look at my work with respect. If we just appropriated something, I wanted to say where it came from...” but Gretton didn’t want the artwork crediting because the futurists were fascists, or at least the movement was requisitioned by Mussolini. And, well, that particular bonfire didn't need any more wood chucking on it...

Blue Monday was a turning point. Until then it was all smart historical pilfering. Peter went up to see New Order recording in Manchester...

“I picked up this floppy disc and I didn’t know what it was. They told me, so I said. Oh great, can I have it? They said. Not that one, Peter, it’s got the album on it."

So they gave him a blank one, and in the car on the way home he hit upon the idea of the next sleeve being a giant floppy disc. This proved to fit New Order's more electronic new direction very well.

For Power, Corruption And Lies, he wanted to juxtapose a modern coded image with a classical painting. He worked out a colour alphabet, wrote the title in this code (and, now legendarily, mis-spelt it, with three Rs in ‘Corruption’), then picked up a postcard of some roses by Fantin-Latour in the National Gallery.

All systems go? Nope, the National had lost the transparency and loaned the painting to Norwich Castle in Norfolk for five years, with a ruling that expressly forbade the taking of any photograph while it was off the premises. A month’s delay ensued.

“Tony Wilson finally spoke to the director of the gallery,” Saville recalls. “He took on his Granada troubleshooter role. He asked the National, Who actually owns the painting? The director said, Well, the people of Great Britain own it. So Tony said, Look, the people of Britain want that picture. And it worked. ”

Thieves Like Us turned out to be Saville's ‘last bit of grand appropriation. Trevor Key and I had always wanted to do a metaphysical photograph...”

The surrounding numbers are a board game whipped from a painted table in Blair Castle that Saville spotted and liked in Country Life. (There is no number seven. ‘Thieves’ is the seventh New Order single. This was an accident.)

By 1985, de rigeur multilayered design had started to bore Saville (“The style game had become painful to me.”) so for Low Life he wanted no concept. He wanted to go back to zero point. He tempted the showbiz-unfriendly band into a photo studio (having been literally laughed at when he first suggested it) and let them art direct their own pics.

It took three rolls of film and 40 minutes. Stephen Morris made the cover because his face was “the most graphic”. Even though the band hate the sleeve of ‘Low Life', Saville loves it, to the point of recycling it as Peter Gabriel’s ‘So’ two years later (“Take the tracing paper off and compare the two,” he says).

Brotherhood and State Of The Nation's sleeves were based on stuff found in a builder’s yard and inspired by avant gardist Yves Klein’s work - which itself was based on nothingness (he once staged an exhibition called The Void, which was just an empty gallery)

But after these sleeves, Saville moved out of art history and into his own. The strange, X-rayed flora on Substance ("Like flowers you'd find in the reception of IBM In the year 2000”), was the first example of Saville and Key’s dichromat process: objects are photographed in black and white and 'coloured in’ on camera. This served them for True Faith, which was inspired by a leaf falling on Saville's windscreen in Ladbroke Square, and Fine Time's ‘evocative’ capsules ("The first time a New Order cover reflected something that was actually going on in youth culture.”) which were paracetamols, since Saville takes “hardly any" drugs. Similarly, Technique featured a cherub “that looked like he was jerking off” which Sav spotted in an antique shop in the Pimlico Road. (New Order were then fixated on Andy Warhol, so one of Rob Gretton's suggested titles for ‘Technique’ was ‘Peter Saville’s New Order’)

By the time of Republic, Saville had stopped doing record sleeves (the last music biz thing he did was Paul McCartney’s World Tour in 1990), and closed down Peter Saville Associates.

“Record sleeve design is a trap. It’s so exciting when you’re 20, but as you approach 30, you don’t live exclusively in Music World any more... ”

He never presumed he’d do the next New Order sleeve, but the band wanted him. With the Factory situation in jeopardy, the quest for brilliant sleeve artwork became a comfort to them in a time of flux. So Saville made a big effort, presenting them with a hundred images in categories, one of which was called Pacific Coast Highway (he’d spent a working summer in LA). They fell in love with a “dumb” beach pic from a photo catalogue (“I’d never seen all four of them agree on one thing before.”) and so Sav went away over Christmas and listened to the album, one track a day, playing picture association.

From a final collection of over a thousand pictures, the ‘Republic’ images were chosen. Brett Wickens blended them on the Apple Mac and ‘Republic”s glorious panorama was the result - possibly New Order’s most striking art-work to date. Don’t suppose the band appreciate it!

ANDREW COLLINS