2020 11 Record Collector New Order

CHOSEN TIME

It took mere months, following the death of Ian Curtis in May 1980, for Joy Division’s Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris to regroup, with a new name - New Order - a new member, Gillian Gilbert, and a new set of songs. In this new (reincarnation they bestrode the 80s like a colossus, propelled by new ideas and newer technology. With a Power, Corruption & Lies box set imminent (review), the band discuss their glorious decade of invention with Dave Simpson, and Daryl Easlea compiles a select discography from their 80s output.

CHAPTER 1: NEW NAME, NEW ORDER

"It was so weird, even I was nervous!” chuckles Gillian Gilbert, thinking back to the solitary performance of the “No Names” on 29 July 1980. Belgian Factory Records band The Names had suddenly pulled out of a performance at The Beach Club, a regular night in the tiny Oozit’s pub on Newgate Street, Shudehill, Manchester. At the last minute, their place was taken by Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner, who were inauspiciously and erroneously introduced as “the last surviving members of [very short-lived Factory act] Crawling Chaos”.

“You could feel everyone’s eyes on them,” remembers Gilbert, who - as Morris’ girlfriend - was in the audience. “I think all three sang a bit and there was a tape machine. It just felt really strange.” Drummer Morris, meanwhile, suggests that it was a mistake letting him operate the tape machine. “It went catastrophically wrong,” he says, emitting a weary sigh.

And yet, with Gilbert (later to become Mrs Morris) soon joining on keyboards and guitar, the band that were briefly The No Names became New Order, a band whose 80s output included the classic single Blue Monday and albums Power, Corruption & Lies, Low-life and Technique, and who have influenced generations of bands, solo artists, DJs and producers, from U2 to Blur to The Chemical Brothers.

“Those first 10 years were really fruitful,” muses bassist Hook, reflecting on how his band went from that tiny Beach Club debut to headlining Glastonbury and Reading festivals, their sound morphing along the way from brooding post-punk to a lighter though bittersweet hybrid of rock and dance, guitars and electronics. “For that whole decade we just never stopped,” he says. Indeed, New Order’s giddy ascent had already begun at The Beach Club.

Just seven weeks earlier, on 23 May 1980, the career of their previous band Joy Division had been brutally and unexpectedly curtailed by singer Ian Curtis’ suicide, leaving behind two studio albums - Unknown Pleasures and Closer - that are revered among rock’s greatest. In those seven weeks, they managed to regroup, move on from Joy Division and assemble a set of new songs, the new band name in place by the time they played Brady’s in Liverpool on 4 September.

“Those few weeks seemed like ages,” Morris reflects over the phone from his Macclesfield house-cum-studio, where he is surrounded by drums and New Order gear, current and vintage. “Ian wasn’t even cold in his grave and we were back at it. Nobody forced us. It was what we wanted to do - keep going, keep going. But when you look at the facts it’s quite disturbing.”

“I think there was a fear that if we didn’t do something quickly everything would fade away,” an equally socially distant Hook explains. “Which wasn’t true. It was an excuse - how we coped with grief. But I must admit it worked.”

The pace of change was such that “Hooky” penned his first tune for the new band - Dreams Never End (from 1981’s debut album, Movement), which he sang - soon after the coroner’s inquest on Curtis. “We had dinner in Macclesfield and asked ourselves, ‘Do we want to carry on or go back to having day jobs?”’ he recalls. “We agreed to rehearse on the Monday and over the weekend I wrote the riff in my bedroom. I took it in and we worked on going forwards.”

Dreams Never End was one of a handful of songs played at The Beach Club. Ceremony and In A Lonely Place (which would form the first New Order single in January 1981) had been written while in Joy Division, but while Ceremony was played once at their last ever gig in Birmingham, In A Lonely Place didn’t even get that far. At The Beach Club, that song and a new composition (Truth) both featured the first use by the band of a drum machine, a sign of electronic things to come. Morris loved the Dr Rhythm DR-55 because it sounded “unnatural”. “It was robotic,” he says. “Like a budget Kraftwerk.” Two more songs — he can’t remember which - were aired at The Beach Club, with Homage, Hour, Cries And Whispers, Mesh and a drum machine version of what would become their second single, Procession, in place by the time they played four small American shows that September. “I programmed In A Lonely Place and Procession, which didn’t really work,” Morris admits: on these songs the machine would relinquish its role to the human drummer.

Another experiment from July 1980, the remarkable Are You Ready For This? (a demo of which finally surfaced on the Movement box set last year), almost sounds like New Order attempting hip-hop. Morris insists that they’d been interested in dance music and electronics right from early Joy Division, their imaginations fired by Donna Summer’s Giorgio Moroder-produced 1977 No 1 I Feel Love, which used similar instrumentation to that later used in New Order. “The 12" of She’s Lost Control was our attempt to make a disco 12" out of a Joy Division song,” Morris observes. “But we didn’t have the gear and we wouldn’t have had a clue how to make a record like I Feel Love back then.”

CHAPTER 2: EVERYTHING'S GONE ELECTRONIC

They didn’t have by 1980, but they were opening up to the possibilities. On that first US trip, young promoter Ruth Polsky took them to New York clubs Hurrah, Danceteria and Paradise Garage, which pulsated with the futuristic sounds of rap, hip-hop and electro.

“Compared to clubs in Manchester, those places were sensational,” Hook remembers. “We were hicks from the sticks, walking around with our mouths open.” In 1982, New Order used those night-spots as the blueprint for their own Manchester superclub, FAC51 The Hacienda. But the first impact they had was on their listening. Morris remembers suddenly accumulating “loads of records with the word ‘rap’ in: Rap Hits Volume X, Mutant Disco, Monsters Of Rap, all that sort of thing, A lot of albums with terrible sleeves that I bought for one track. Stuff we heard in clubs and the sound of New York radio: Shep Pettibone, Sharon Redd, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock, Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight... This was just at the time we were trying to escape the shadow of Joy Division, thinking, ‘What kind of band can we be?”’

Listening to influential disco/hi-NRG/ dance producer Patrick Cowley’s DJ sets in London’s Heaven club (where New Order would perform on 9 February 1981) was also significant. So, too, oddly, was getting all their guitars and drums stolen in New York: they were all recovered or replaced, but to Morris, it felt “symbolic, like we had a clean slate”.

Their transformation gathered pace on their return from America, when Stockport College business studies HND student Gillian Gilbert was recruited to the line-up, joining in October 1980 to play keyboards and guitar. “I asked my father if I could do it and he said, ‘You might as well,”’ she chuckles. “I learned the songs on my sister’s Bontempi organ. A lot of Joy Division fans didn’t like the new lineup. I think they expected somebody else like Ian [Curtis], or another bloke. But after the early gigs I seemed to be accepted.” By now, guitarist Bernard Sumner had reluctantly become lead vocalist because no one else really fancied it, although Morris admits that lyrics -which they all wrote together — were a struggle. “We were trying to write like Ian,” he sighs. “You know, consciously thinking, ’What would Ian write?”’

The loss of Curtis was followed by that of Martin Hannett, the legendary producer who’d worked such wizardry on the Joy Division albums. He’d taken Curtis’ death particularly badly and his use of hard drugs had become a habit. By the time New Order recorded Movement with him during April-May 1981 at Strawberry studio in Stockport (where they’d recorded Unknown Pleasures as Joy Division), the band-producer relationship had all but broken down.

“We had such a tough time making Movement, emotionally, because of Martin,” Hook admits. “He was grieving, getting into drugs heavily and made no bones about telling us how the ‘genius’ had died and left behind the shit Manchester United fans. He’d lock himself in a room with a gram of coke and say, ‘If I hear anything I like I’ll come out.’ And not come out! It was such a kick in the balls, so after Movement we never gave him another chance.” Nevertheless, the bassist remains very fond of that highly underrated debut album, which featured synthesisers and Syndrums alongside guitar, bass and drums. He regards it now as “a New Order album with Joy Division vocals” but says it pointed to where they would go next.

And then suddenly, New Order came up with a triumvirate of tunes that would help them make that decisive break. For Morris, the singles Everything’s Gone Green (1981) and Temptation b/w Hurt (1982) are “the point at which Joy Division stopped and New Order started”. Key was New Order’s realisation that the drum machine had an output and the synthesiser had an input. “And if you plugged one into the other, Voila! This jigga-jigga electronic rhythm,” Morris explains. Gilbert found this “really exciting, because it was so unusual”. For the drummer, it was “revolutionary”. Not least when the band started playing along with it with guitar, bass and drums.

Hook reveals that he actually has a cassette of the band jamming together for what became Everything’s Gone Green. “It’s quite long - seven or eight minutes - and at the end you can hear us discussing what we’re going to do with the track, which bits we like and so on.” “It was a hybrid,” Morris confirms. “That was the great thing about it. We’d discovered a way of mixing electronic stuff with a rock band. Sometimes [the gig in Hamburg in 1981, for example, when skinheads took over the dressing room, forcing the band back onstage] we could jam it for up to half an hour. Just us playing, with this thing [electronic rhythm] driving us along.” Morris didn’t find it easy playing in time to a drum machine, but was determined to get it right. Hook was adamant that he still wanted to play his bass. “But by almost fighting against it, he ended up playing bass in a different way,” notes Morris. “There was no need for a bassline any more so he ended up playing melodies over the top of it.” The band were mixing the single when Hannett walked out because the band wanted to turn the drums up. They finished the job themselves, their first steps towards self-production. From now on, with some select exceptions. New Order would mostly produce themselves.

Their first attempt was 1982 single Temptation, which used the same techniques as Everything’s Gone Green but, according to Hook, “was much more accomplished, more of a song”. Morris suggests that Temptation was partly influenced by US duo Sparks’ electronic work with Giorgio Moroder [New Order covered their When I’m With You live in Milan in June 1982] and that the reason the Temptation 7” and 12” versions sound very different is because “nobody ever thought to record a long version and edit it down. Instead, we just played it twice.” The distinctive whoop at the start of the 12” version is Sumner, squealing after manager Rob Gretton put a snowball down his back.

Live tapes from the period document Temptation’s evolution from a nervous instrumental to a jam with improvised lyrics (“People need people like you, people need people like me... Up town, turn around, hit the floor, hit the ground”) to a fully-fledged New Order classic with that memorable lyric, “Oh, you’ve got green eyes, oh, you’ve got blue eyes, oh, you’ve got grey eyes”, which still features in most New Order setlists to this day.

By now, Sumner was writing far more of the lyrics and found a means that worked. “We were literally writing the songs in front of the audience,” Morris explains. “Bernard wouldn’t sit down and write lyrics, but he’d have a bottle of Pernod, come out with stuff and we’d tape it.” Gilbert expands: “He’d just sing whatever came into his head. We’d jam and experiment with really good lyrics or really bad lyrics! Depending on how he was feeling. He’d drink onstage to take the pressure off being a frontman but gradually he got more into singing. Especially in the studio, where he could hear how he sounded. So he’d hone the lyrics gradually and realised he could really enjoy singing.”

The B-side, Hurt (originally titled Cramp), connected the Prophet 5 synth’s built-in sequencer with a Clef Master Rhythm drum machine for another pivotal progression: New Order’s first use of an I Feel Love-type sequencer rhythm, again blended with “rock” bass and drums. “If you listen to early versions, they’re electro jams that go on for bloody ages,” laughs Morris. “We started it as an instrumental, like something off [David Bowie’s] Low. You’ve got bubbly synths and a sequenced bassline and me and Hooky trying to figure out how to play along with it. It was another leap.”

CHAPTER 3: HIGH LIVING AND LOW-LIFE

In 1983, New Order made a series of leaps, many of them the sequencer-driven songs that made up much of Power, Corruption & Lies. 586 [its fade-in influenced by the one that opens Sparks’ No 1 Song In Heaven], Ultraviolence, The Village, Your Silent Face and the Vocoder-driven Ecstasy coexisted with more traditional guitar-based tracks Leave Me Alone, We All Stand and Age Of Consent. “Movement was us playing together like we had in Joy Division,” Hook observes. “But after Power, Corruption & Lies sequencers and such became much more integrated.” Recording at Pink Floyd’s Britannia Row studio in London - where they’d recorded Closer, with Curtis for the final time — meant they had access to thousands of pounds’ worth of programming and recording equipment.

Hook remembers a happy time chez Floyd: games of snooker on their plush table, prepared sandwiches in the afternoon and a level of luxury they’d never enjoyed before.

“I drove down in Rob’s imported Granada, parked outside and this kid came out of a block of flats opposite and said, ‘Are you Peter Hook? You shouldn’t park your car there.’ He turned out to be a big fan and put the word out, so our cars were left untouched.” This allowed them to focus their attentions on creating a dancefloor classic.

As Gilbert tells it, Blue Monday - kept off the album because, at over seven minutes, it was deemed too long, though Gretton knew a hit single when he heard it - originated as an experiment so that the machines could play an encore by themselves. “At first, there was a robot voice singing,” she says. “Then, gradually, the robot got wiped off.” It was written using their new poly-sequencer and hi-tech DMX drum machine, to see how they worked as much as anything. Such technology wasn’t always futuristic, though. Gilbert had to write the song’s various sections out like a storyboard. “Each tap on a sequencer was one square in an exercise book. If you missed one you had to go back to the start. I had all these bits of paper stuck together with Sellotape, like a massive scroll, but the song did feel completely different.”

Blue Monday almost used an Emulator - a cheaper alternative to the Fairlight polyphonic sampling technology that was starting to revolutionise pop music, because suddenly it was possible not just to make any sound imaginable but “play” it on a keyboard. Faced with such groundbreaking technology, Morris and Sumner initially did what many a Salford or Macclesfield lad might - sampled their own farts. Strangely enough, the farts never made it onto record, but Hook’s Ennio Morricone-inspired bassline did. Sumner added the finishing touch — his vocals — wearing engineer Michael Johnson’s old Kit Kat factory outfit, which looked like a professor’s lab coat. The perfect outfit to create a musical revolution, which, released in March 1983, became (at least reputedly) the biggest-selling 12” of all time.

Their next step was to return to New York, to make an electro 12”. As Morris tells it, Arthur Baker - who’d produced Bambaataa’s Planet Rock - was mentioned as a potential producer even before Power, Corruption & Lies, but in those pre-internet days it wasn’t easy for a band in Manchester to track such people down. “We’d heard Planet Rock but had no idea who had done it,” the drummer explains. “‘Arthur Baker? Who is that?’ It sounds ridiculous now where you just go straight to Google. But then, later on, we’d done Blue Monday, got rid of Martin and were quite comfortable with production. We liked the sound of these American club records and put the word around. So we went over there to work with Arthur.”

If it sounds an inspired idea, the actual creative process was anything but. Hook recalls being completely unprepared for Baker’s working methods. “We thought we’d go in and write the way we normally did, jamming for hours. He said, ‘Fuck that, man. We’ll just go in the studio and write something.’ We’re like, ‘What?’” Hook describes the process as a “nightmare”. Morris prefers “terrifying”. Not least when Baker programmed the 808 drum machine himself and would hardly let the actual drummer touch a thing. “He’d go, ‘You can mess about with this... but don’t touch that! ” Morris chuckles. In the end, the drummer did “reverse cymbals and bongos, piano hits, stuff like that. Dubbing it up basically, as Rob [Gretton] used to say.” At the end of the song, Hook’s powerful, brooding bass brought postpunk to hip-hop. Confusion — delivered on 12” in four mixes - was a success on every level, and duly reached No 12 in August 1983.

The band were still ensconced in the studio when Baker came in saying he’d seen the phrase Thieves Like Us written on a wall. “How about writing a song called that?” And why not? What would eventually become an electro ballad began with his involvement (in so doing, he became the first person outside the band to share a New Order songwriting credit) but mostly worked on back in England, before eventual release in 1984. “I’ve got a cassette and the version we did with Arthur sounds absolutely nothing like the finished song,” says Morris. “It’s just a two-bar loop. Very lo-fi.”

The new Power, Corruption & Lies 2020 definitive edition box set captures the song’s next stage, which Morris describes as, “Us trying to make it sound more like us. If Arthur had done it he wouldn’t have put a four-minute intro on it. We weren’t actively breaking rules. We just didn’t know there were any.” They hadn’t entirely left rock behind, though, and the B-side, Lonesome Tonight, was one of their most sublime guitar tracks.

In fact, guitars returned with a vengeance for their next album, 1985’s classic, Low-Life. Hook remembers 1984-85 - which saw the appearance of new songs such as Sunrise and Sooner Then You Think - as “probably our happiest period”. They certainly had reason to be cheerful. Blue Monday and Power, Corruption & Lies hadn’t just shaken off the shadow of Joy Division, but established the group as a major creative and commercial force. Low-Life (described by Richard Cook in his NME review as “New Order’s Closer, at last”) was effectively the first New Order album written as a mainstream band — and for a whole new audience.

“We had the Saturday disco crowd and the dance stuff scared off the remaining long macs,” Morris maintains, referring to the Joy Division army of studious young men in raincoats. “It was exciting that there was anyone there at all, but there were a lot of people that had never heard of Joy Division. That was part of the feeling of going to America. Before, in England, a lot of the audience mistrusted what we were doing, because we weren’t Joy Division anymore. When Blue Monday came out there was a lot of ‘this is a step too far’ initially, but we’d found our sound.”

Not that chart appearances brought about any great changes in approach. “We never sat down and said, ‘Let’s write a song like this.’ We just did it,” Morris insists. They were enjoying themselves out of the studio as well. For Gilbert, the album captures the atmosphere of the London nightlife and in particular the BDSM clubs they enjoyed on evenings after a day’s work at Jam and old favourite Brit Row. “We went to Heaven a lot, and were taken to Skin Two,” she chuckles. “Everyone had to wear rubber or leather - which Hooky already did, so that wasn’t a problem. I do remember somebody asked me if I’d hold his dog collar and drag him around.” She laughs hard at the memory. “It was quite an eye-opener, really.”

Meanwhile, they were experimenting musically as well. Punchy album opener Love Vigilantes is Sumner’s idea of a country and western tune, with terrific lyrics about a soldier pining for his family. The haunting Elegia - initially commissioned as soundtrack music for a film that never got made — was a 23-minute instrumental, edited for the album. “No drums,” Morris notes. “And in 3/4 time. We were often doing the opposite to the last thing we did.” The Perfect Kiss used the Emulator for frog noises; the bassline-fired Sunrise evoked Joy Division. “That was the great thing to me,” he says, “that we could do all this stuff.”

However, if their second and third albums saw New Order perfectly assimilating their electronic and acoustic/rock sides, their fourth would see them suddenly diverge entirely.

CHAPTER 4: FROM LONDON LOWS TO SPANISH HIGHS

Morris still isn’t entirely sure why 1986’s Brotherhood had two distinct sides — one rock, the other electronic, featuring heavily programmed songs such as Angel Dust and All Day Long. “Maybe it was the only way the tracks would flow,” he suggests. Hook’s take hints at future divisions in the camp. “Me and Barney were arguing all the time. He hated the rock side and loved the synth side. The big argument between us on the rock side was the amount of backing vocals he put on the choruses, which I thought he did to piss me off. He was monopolising the electronic side.” 

Morris seems to back this up. “Hooky was pushing the rock stuff, like Broken Promises. I thought that was just us trying to write a token rock track. I thought, ‘We could have done better than this.’” The stickman suggests that recording in three different studios [Jam in London, Windmill Lane in Dublin and Amazon in Liverpool] also impacted on the schizophrenic feel of his least favourite 80s New Order album. Gilbert isn’t that enamoured of Brotherhood, either. “The title seems too blokey. Perhaps I took it too personally. I wasn’t involved much in the guitar side.” Nevertheless, New Order’s fourth did contain some great tracks - notably the guitar/drums As It Is When It Was - and at least one perfect pop song.

Inexplicably, at the time, Bizarre Love Triangle - its cascading riff produced on a hired Fairlight - limped to No 56. “It’s our greatest miss,” sighs Morris. “I’ve never understood why it wasn’t as big as Blue Monday.” Still, “BLT” has become almost as loved among fans as Ceremony and Temptation were by early 80s devotees.

Their next single would enter the UK Top 5 twice - on release in 1987, and on re-release in 1994 - and see New Order crack the US Top 40. Quite an achievement for a UK independent band. It was a long way from The Beach Club. True Faith brought in a producer for the first time since Arthur Baker, knob-twiddler Stephen Hague also receiving a songwriting credit. However, True Faith didn’t come easy, a ruckus breaking out between the US producer and the Salford bassist. Today, Hook insists that Hague never wanted his signature twangs anywhere near the record. He’d felt put out over this sort of situation once before — when the others came up with 586 without him - but on that occasion his bass-playing provided the icing on the cake. So it proved again. Hooky remembers giving up, leaving the band and producer in the studio and True Faith without any bass, his long face on exit glimpsed by Tom Atencio, New Order’s colourful US business manager. “Tom asked me what was wrong, then said, ‘Are you kidding?”’ the bass behemoth recalls. “So he went into the control room to see Stephen Hague. I think they must have had an argument, but the next thing I knew, he came out and told me, ‘Get back in, you fucker! Get back in and play some fucking bass.’ So I did... I soon got the melody on the intro, then played on the middle and the end.” And yet again those signature twangs are the cherry on the cake of one of their finest singles.

Meanwhile, the electronic odyssey would touch down somewhere else. In 1988, music was experiencing a revolution: the so-called Second Summer Of Love. Acid house swept the nation’s clubs and then the charts in arguably the biggest sea-change in styles (baggy gear and luminous tops) and sounds (squelchy synths and clattering Roland 303s) since New Romantic, possibly even punk. The following year, the new broom swept in Factory bandmates (and former New Order support band) Happy Mondays and then Stone Roses, both of whose early works Messrs Hannett, Sumner and Hook had produced.

New Order kept an ear on things but, as ever, were on their own trajectory. “I’d read about this studio in a magazine,” relates Hook, referring to the exotically titled and state-of-the-art Mediterranean sound temple on the island of Ibiza. “By Brotherhood we were partying so much that it got in the way of the record. We’d become completely nocturnal. So, I felt that for the next record we should get out of the way. Where better than the peace and quiet of Ibiza?”

However, no sooner than Hooky had that thought than the peace and quiet were shattered by Balearic beats and raves. He’s still laughing at this today. “I couldn’t have got it more wrong,” he says. New Order hardly kept away, partying with a vengeance, more so, even, than during Brotherhood. The new party drug Ecstasy - which had turned up in the Hacienda - seemed to follow them to the Med. Visiting Factory boss Tony Wilson surveyed the carnage - and his label’s bank account - and declared New Order’s summer ’88 Ibizan sojourn “the most expensive holiday you’ve ever had.”

Morris insists that, while they may have been getting off their faces, they were listening to the music which would soon fill up the charts in Britain and elsewhere, impacting on their fifth album, Technique. “In Ibiza it was more Balearic beats than acid house,” he reflects. “They’d play all these club tracks and then put Phil Collins on. I remember listening to [Love’s] Forever Changes a lot on a crappy stereo. Psychedelic stuff.” Which, according to Gilbert, directly influenced Technique's sublime closer, Dream Attack. However, only the markedly acid/Balearic-tinged Fine Time was actually recorded in Ibiza. As Hooky remembers it, “Barney [Sumner] came back from a club with the tune in his head, woke up [engineer] Michael Johnson to do it, worked on it all night and then collapsed into bed.” 

Morris further refutes any suspicion that their time was wasted, though. “To say we did fuck-all there isn’t fair, it was constructive,” he argues. “Technique sounds like Ibiza even though we did it in Bath.” Specifically, Peter Gabriel’s plush Real World studios, where there was only one nightclub (Moles) for miles around. Not that this stopped them having what the drummer describes as “techno parties in the living room”. For Hook, Technique — especially tracks such as Round & Round, Run, Mr. Disco and Vanishing Point -“captured the spirit of everything at that time. It was a beautiful summer.”

There were technological developments, too. Computers — specifically, Apple computers - were now part of New Order’s approach to music-making. As Gilbert - who remembers herself and Morris establishing a “writing space” in their bedroom to work on ideas — explains, “As soon as we got a new piece of equipment, we’d write something on it.” “We were reprogramming so you’d have perfect drum takes,” expands Morris. “Days and days of snipping and gluing them back together. Sampling a single note of a guitar and putting it in the sampler.” As with Power, Corruption & Lies, Technique finds guitars and electronics in shimmering, perfect union. “The irony being that there are loads of guitars on Technique but they’re all programmed,” chuckles Morris. “I love the fact that there’s loads of acousticsounding instruments but they’re electronic. That album was the culmination of everything we’d done to that point.”

In their second decade, New Order would endure fallouts, recrimination, the collapse of Factory Records, more hits and - in 2007 - a permanent schism between band and bassist. But that’s another story. Their first 10 years was a period of dizzying invention during which they mapped out the course of much of British music, and created a hybrid of rock and electronica which still provides a blueprint for countless bands today.

“I hear our influence everywhere, but we never thought about that,” Hook decides, finally. “For us it was just about carrying on without Ian. The only thing we ever thought about was writing the next tune.” 

Power, Corruption & Lies, the 2020 definitive edition, is on Warner Music. New Order’s new single Be A Rebel is on Mute. Steve Morris’ book, Fast Forward, is published by Constable on 12 November. The band's one-off London headline show at The 02 in October is now rescheduled to 6 November 2021.

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ELECTRIC DREAMS

THE GADGETS THAT MADE NEW ORDER

BOSS DR-55 Dr Rhythm drum machine 

New Order’s early, battery-operated drum machine, used on Truth.

Stephen Morris: “On Movement it comes in on the wrong beat. A member of the band was responsible for this editing, and it wasn't me!”

Powertran 1024 Note Composer sequencer / Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 synthesiser with built-in poly-sequence

Sumner and boffin friend Martin Usher built the Powertran from a kit.

SM: “We ended up taking Martin to Australia on tour with us. Whenever he was around, everything worked fine. As soon as he wasn’t, it broke down again.”

Oberheim DMX drum machine

The drum machine that spawned Blue Monday’s unmistakable intro and could mimic a human drummer.

SM: “I could replace myself! Whenever it broke down, the others thought I’d sabotaged it to keep my job.”

E-mu Emulator II sampling synth

Used to sample the choir-like voices from Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity, as heard on Blue Monday.

Gillian Gilbert: “Bernard and Stephen worked out how to use it by spending hours recording farts.”

E-mu Drumulator drum machine

All over Technique.

SM: “A drum machine that functions as a sampler, but we did go a bit mad with that. On Dream Attack, we sampled every note in the guitar riff and then programmed them individually. It was bonkers."

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CEREMONIAL

NEW ORDER 80s MEMORABILIA

NEW ORDER 1983 CHICAGO FRAMED POSTER

For performance on Thursday 30 June 1983, plus 2 x backstage passes. Frame measures approx 59x45cm.

NEW ORDER BLUE MONDAY 12" PROOF SLEEVE 

Frame measures approx 69x41cm. Light creasing and scuffs.

NEW ORDER RIAA GOLD AWARD FOR TECHNIQUE 

Presented to Peter Hook to commemorate the sale of more than 500,000 copies of the Qwest Records album and cassette Technique. Frame measures approx 53x43cm.

“A LEWEY FOR NEW ORDER’’ ROUND & ROUND STATUETTE 

Limited edition statuette the same as that which features on their 12" single Round & Round from their 1989 album Technique. Limited numbers were made and given to band members and staff at Factory.

FAC 75 BLUE MONDAY COMMEMORATIVE ANVIL 

Cast iron anvil in the shape of Peter Saville's FAC43 logo, presented to the designer to commemorate more than 500,000 sales of Blue Monday.

NEW ORDER “THE END’’ FINAL SETUP

Incredible audio rig from Club Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina on 18 November, 2006, the last gig Hook played with the band.

To include 2 x AMPEG SVT1700 Watt Heads (Sno: TCLWI170038 & Sno: TCLWI10023)

1. KORG Tuner DTR-1000 Sno; 021623

2. ALEMBIC Valve Pre-amp F-2B Sno; 219090

3. DRAWMER Dual Noise-Gate DS-201 Sno; 09116

4. YAMAHA Digital Delay Sno; 3927

5. ROLAND SIP-301 Pre-Amp Sno; 830321

6. AMCRON DC300A lOOOwatt Stereo Amplifier Sno; 15V118

TRUE FAITH AWARD

Peter Hook’s Brit gong for Best British Video, presented 1988.

Items are taken from the “Peter Hook Signature Collection - New Order” auction, scheduled for February 2021.