2001 10 New Order The Guide

 

Reunited in a day

New Order are back after their latest split with a new album and tour, and not before time. It s like they’ve never been away, says Ian Gittins

Getting paid to play the songs we love is the best fucking job in the world,” declares Peter Hook, with some conviction. Then he pauses, and gazes ruminatively around the chic Alderley Edge brasserie regularly frequented by his near neighbours, David and Victoria Beckham. “It’s weird, that, innit?” he adds.

Weird, that, innit? It’s a phrase used repetitively, almost reflexively, by both original bass monster Hooky and his partner-in-crime, perennial boy-child singer Bernard Sumner, as they muse aloud over the chequered and extraordinary history of New Order, the band they formed from the ashes of post-punk icons Joy Division after the suicide of singer Ian Curtis in 1980.

This week, New Order begin their first national tour for eight years. After their last such outing, which climaxed at Reading Festival in 1993, they put down their instruments, walked offstage, and didn’t speak to each other for the next five years. Weird, that, innit?

“We hated each other back then,” says Sumner, in his trademark Mancunian whisper. ‘After the Reading concert, we had a party. Neither me nor Hooky went, because we couldn’t bear to be in the same room.”

“The party was in the hotel room between mine and Bernard’s,” develops Hooky: “I was sat on my bed in my room, thinking, 'I'm not going if that bastard’s there,’ and he was sat on his bed thinking the same about me.”

Such band tensions were entirely understandable back then. New Order — Sumner, Hook, drummer Steve Morris and keyboardist Gillian Gilbert — were living through a nightmare. Factory Records, their maverick independent record label run by former Granada TV newsreader Tony Wilson, was heading for bankruptcy, pulled down by loss-making nightclub the Hacienda, in which the band had invested heavily. It appeared that New Order faced financial ruin.

“It all went bust,” says Hook. “Inevitably. Then the liquidators found this piece of paper, signed by all the Factory directors. It said, ‘The musicians own the music, and we own nothing.’They couldn’t believe it. But we were free.”

Despite this lucky escape, New Order remained riven by tensions and went their separate ways. Sumner launched his Electronic project, with Johnny Marr. Hook formed first Revenge, and then Monaco. Morris and Gilbert, the inseparable couple, became the ironically named The OtherTwo. For half a decade, the factions never even sent each other as much as a Christmas card. Weird, that, innit?

“I suppose some people would call it strange,” confesses Sumner. “But that’s just us. We’d been in a state of compression with each other for years. We needed a break.”

“I hated it, though,” says Hook. “I thought my life was over. Before I formed my own bands, I just thought, ‘That’s it. I’ve had it. New Order’s dead, and I’ve got nothing.’”

It was New Order’s founder manager, the late Rob Gretton, who manipulated the band back together. After numerous attempts, he succeeded in reuniting the four in 1998 and told them they’d been offered some festival dates.

“We were dead nervous before the meeting,” says Hook. “Dreading it. Then we met, and of course, after five minutes it was like we’d seen each other the day before. Just the same as it always was.”

“Because,” says Sumner, “the fact that we never thought we’d get together again showed us what we had, and cleared out all the animosity between us.”

This year, New Order released Get Ready, their first studio album since 1993’s patchy Republic. It’s a classic New Order record, Sumner’s vulnerable, ingenue vocals once again forming a yearning counterpoint to Hook’s rampaging basslines. Perhaps because Gilbert was nursing Grace, her sick daughter, and thus unable to contribute her usual symphonic layers of keyboard, Get Ready resembles the petrified, stripped-down rock’n’roll of Joy Division more than any previous New Order album.

It is, of course, the spectre of Joy Division that eternally haunts New Order’s music and shapes people’s reactions to it. Sumner describes Ian Curtis as the “ghost” casting a shadow across their music, even now. Hook also acknowledges the potency of the mythology surrounding the band. “There is something mystical about death,” he sighs. “Especially in the face of success.”

And yet in person, Sumner and Hook, as ever, belie the careful enigma inextricably linked to Joy Division and New Order. It’s hard to imagine two more down-to-earth, grounded souls. Sumner confesses freely that he can find the reverence afforded the group tiresome. “I don’t want to sound blase,” he avers, “but I don’t need people adoring me. I really can’t be doing with it.”

Hook is even more forthright when informed that Billy Corgan, the former Smashing Pumpkins singer who is playing guitar with the group on the Get Ready tour, believes that Joy Division and New Order have produced a canon of songs to rival the Beatles.

“I s’pose it’s nice of Billy to say that,” he reflects. “But so what? It’s all very well, but it’s not going to help me clean up the dogshit in my yard, is it? Or owt like that.”

“It’s better than a kick in the testicles, I guess,” confers Sumner, solemnly.

So New Order have come back, but they’ve affected changes. A few old post-punk dictums have been ditched. They now occasionally play encores (“We tried to remember the reason why we always refused to,” confesses Hook. “We couldn’t.”) They are also playing Joy Division songs, something they’d always said they’d never do.

‘After Ian died, we completely dropped all our old music,” remembers Sumner. “We started again, basically. It was a very brave thing to do. Maybe it was stupid. But now we figure, we put all that work in to writing those songs why not play them?”

“We played Atmosphere [an iconic, melancholic Joy Division track] in Liverpool a few weeks ago,” says Hook. “People were crying. We were looking around, going, What the fuck’s the matter with them?’We’d forgotten how beautiful that song is, and how many people’s lives it touched. Weird, that, innit?”

Indeed, and equally bizarre is New Order’s touching doubt about the reception they are likely to receive on their comeback tour. Get Ready is already close to becoming their best-selling album globally but still Peter Hook is unable to believe they’ve sold out two dates at Manchester Apollo, a medium-sized hometown venue.

“I bet my mate we wouldn’t sell ’em out,” he says. “Lost a tenner. I’ve just always worried a lot. Barney looks like fuckin’ Peter Pan, but I worry people will come to see us and look at me and say, What’s that old git doing on stage?’ I’ve been going to the gym to lose weight, to make sure that at least they can’t call me a fat old git.”

“I don’t even like touring that much,” says Sumner. “I prefer being in the studio. It’s much more creative. And pop music’s a very fleeting thing really isn’t it?”

As we speak, New Order haven’t seen the imminent movie 24 Hour Party People, the Factory Records story starring Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson. Sumner, though, loved the launch party, held in a reconstructed Hacienda. ‘We never got to have a closing party at the real Hac. We had to close it too quickly, because of all the gangster trouble. So we finally got to have a farewell party.”

The singer has a tiny cameo in the finished movie, as “a stupefied drunk on the dance floor. I’m quite good at it, actually.” Hook, meanwhile, is slightly concerned about the nature of his portrayal by Ralph Little, The Royle Family’s reliably gormless teenager, Anthony.

“Every time I see him out,” he says, “he comes up to me and says, ‘Hooky, I’m really sorry.’ Then he runs off. Then he comes back, and says it again. I still haven’t worked out what he’s apologising for yet.” 

And so these two bluff, unaffected souls, who met on their first day at Salford Grammar School 34 years ago, take their leave. Sumner is flying to Croatia for a week’s sunshine before the tour begins. Hooky is going to the gym, so nobody can call him a fat old git on stage. He has a parting thought.

“The funny thing is,” he reflects, “having spent five years saying, ‘Bollocks, I’ll never do another New Order record,’ now I can’t wait to do the next one. I suppose I must be a lost cause again.”

Weird, that, innit?

New Order are playing Manchester Apollo, Thursday 4, Friday 5; Glasgow Barrowlands, October 8; Brixton Academy, October 10-12