1986 01 11 Melody Maker New Order Feature

SHAMING THE NATION

With last year's album 'Low-life', NEW ORDER finally laid the ghost of Joy Division and emerged as one of this nation's saving graces with a unique sound and demonstrable staying power. One night at the Hacienda in Manchester, they spoke to Adam Sweeting about past, present and future. Moody and magnificent poses by Tom Sheehan

By Stephen Morris's account, New Order are very shy. Very, very shy, in fact. I'd suggested to Morris, who's the drummer, that New Order often seem aloof, even entirely dismissive of their audience. They play their songs, stop and walk off. End of story.

"Er..." said Morris, wincing in the general direction of the floor. "Very very shy..."

Is that right?

"Certainly is. Cos you're just being yourself onstage. It would be quite easy to go 'are ya feelin' alright!' and all that, but ... Good grief, no! I don;t think we've been aloof. You can't really ignore an audience, it's a little bit intimidating, so you tend to find yourself getting annoyed back because you're feeling intimidated."

Listening to New Order's third and finest album "Low-life", it's difficult to believe they could be so easily cowed. Its predecessor, 1983's "Power Corruption and Lies", was pretty potent stuff too, including as it did "Age of Consent" and the enduring "Your Silent Face". But "Low-life" seemed bigger, assured and at ease with itself. Perhaps it had taken New Order this long to find themselves, develop a new forward-looking vision and exorcise the Ghost of Curtis Past.

Peter Hook:: "It was like the old getting back into writing thing after Joy Division, and finally now we're back to how we were before he died. We're confident about everything that we do now, so that's nice. We feel we can rely on each other, if you like."

So it took a long time, to shake off the past?

"Erm... I don't think it took as long as people thought. You still get people who say 'ah, New Order are shit, Joy Division are the best'. But we're still Joy Division, there's no difference apart from the obvious one."

One chilly December night, New Order were on home turf in the Hacienda in Manchester, playing two sets for the paying punters and having a couple of numbers dropped into the "Whistle Test" live. We arrived for the soundcheck. Bernard Albrecht picked up a guitar, plugged it in and began to chug out some of his trademark throaty chords. Morris pottered about at his drumkit, firing off the ocassional burst of drum machine, adjusting cymbals, tightening knobs and checking his banks of gadgets. The ghostly Gillian fingered a synthesizer impassively. Manager Rob Gretton, a kind of happy Jack Hargreaves, looked on with his hands in his pockets.

It was the arrival of Peter Hook which abruptly set the chemistry in motion. Hook, unshaven, gingery-blond hair died back and flopping over the collar of his heavy black leather biker's jacket, is part Monster of Rock, part Ian Botham when he has an Australian in his sights. He wears his bass low-slung, treating it more like a trail-bike than a musical instrument.

The sound is something else. According to Bunnymen bassist Les Pattinson, Hook plugs his bass through every device available, and it hits you like a falling log, a soaring, supercharged cudgel of sound. It seems to push back the walls and raise the ceiling, giving everybody else room to do whatever they like, secure in the knowledge that a noise like that couldn't possibly let you down.

Hook unloosed a few volleys of notes, then the group dropped in behind his zooming riff for a new song called "As It Is And When It Was". A powerful and spacious piece, it bears more than a passing resemblance to "Love Will Tear Us Apart". Hook grinned evilly to himself. Some "Whistle Test" personnel paused to listen, dressed, of course, in the obligatory media punk style. New Order don't even seem to look at each other while they play, but they must be listening. Suddenly they've become shockingly good, full of confidence and guts.

"I never noticed that until somebody pointed out to me, funnily enough" said Hook after the second set. "Our American agent, it was - she said 'play that "Love Will Tear Us Apart" one' I thought fuckin' ell, yeah, it is! Wild! That was one we played on the "Whistle Test", it's a really good song. Just shows you, you can rip yourself off, even if you do it unconsciously."

Better than having Trevor Horn doing it for you, Hook laughed expansively. He's not easy to feel at ease with, although talkative enough. Even his gestures of relaxation seem exaggerated - he answers some questions too quietly, he leans back a little too far in his chair, eyes you with a mocking grin. He makes you aware you're under scrutiny.

"People think we're very awkward because we won't do things. I'm not gonna do yer photographs because I don't feel like it. I don't mind talkin. I feel like talking because I've been in the studio every night for two weeks, but I just don't feel like having me picture took.

"I don't do anything unless I want to do it. I do it sometimes for an easy life, when you're too fucked to argue about it or something. But you always regret it in the morning."

That seems like a fairly macho attitude to life.

"Could be, mmmm," Hook agred readily.

"You're probably right. But that might be down to the fact that I can get away with it, because of the way Factory works. If any of us didn't want to do something, the others wouldn't expect him to do it. Because, y'know, what's the point? There's no point in playing a certain song if someone really doesn't want to do it."

THE PRESS

Bernard: "We had a report from WOMAD in your newspaper which gave us a really shitey review. I bet you don't print this but she was completely out of her box drunk, blacked out when we were playing. And she gave us a really bad review. She wasn't even there, which I found particularly annoying. She said we never did an encore. We did do an encore. I don't like people who lie." Peter: "It's interesting to talk to people who are interested in what you are doing, whether they think you're shit or whether they think you're great. You can learn something. That Sounds guy recently - he was a total turd. He hadn't listened to the LP and he was interviewing us about it, which I thought was absolutely disgusting for a rock weekly which is supposed to be informing people about what's happening in modern music.

"He was saying to me 'the songs on "Low-life" are a lot more optimistic than the ones on "Power Corruption And Lies", why's that?' I said 'well I don't think they are. There's a lot of really up songs on "Power". That's not true'. And he said 'well the lyrics are more optimistic'. I said 'I don't think so, I don't think that's true'. Then he said 'well I haven't actually heard it, the sub-editor told me to ask you that'.

"That was where the thing about the fight came in, which was fuckin' bullshit anyway. If we'd had a fight I'd have ripped his fuckin' head off, he was a wimp. But he sort of steered it round as if to say he offered me out! The whole thing was pathetic. It came across in the interview, it was a pathetic interview. They've asked us to do another one and I'm not surprised, cos he just got nothing out of it.

"He was a complete dickhead, he wasn't doing his job. It comes down to respect, doesn't it? You seem alright to talk to, you don't seem too bad. Quite interesting, y'know what I mean?" You're too kind. "But he wasn't interesting - he just did it very badly, so he got treated badly. What do you expect? Ask someone jokey questions and you're gonna get jokey answers."

NEW ORDER have perhaps been dogged by their reluctance to explain themselves, or to give anybody much idea of what they're really like. With the exception of Hook, though, they seem genuinely introverted, even painfully so. They and the Bunnymen are mutual fans, not necessarily to the point of loving every song the other has recorded, but because of a sense that they share the same attitude. Les Pattinson came over to Manchester for the Hacienda appearance, on the eve of the Bunnymen's British tour. Hook's rock'n'roll star stage gyrations amuse him greatly, presumably in contrast to his own onstage passivity.

THE HACIENDA

BERNARD: "We've got money invested in it. The original idea was that it was a loose club where you could go and hear loose music, not stiff music, and also you didn't have to get dressed up to go. Anyone could come here, anyone at all." Q: So it's anti The Face type of attitude?

Bernard: "Yeah, but people like that can come as well. Originally we intended it to be a bit more of a venue but it's turned out to be more of a disco than a venue. It was also just to establish a scene in Manchester, maybe like in the early days of Factory when we 'ad a club which is now called the Russell Club which was then called The Factory, in Moss Side. But that got a bit rough, people gettin' beat-up outside and mugged."

Peter: "The idea of The Hacienda was a club that wasn't accompanied by any bullshit, where you could get in dressed as you like, which Manchester at the time didn't have. It didn't have a club where you could go out. I never used to fucking get in anywhere, except if there was a gig, then they'd let you in. The Hacienda was the first club where you could get in dressed as you liked. And I had to fuckin' open it!

"Now in Manchester all the clubs are like that. The Hacienda has had a really good effect on Manchester as a whole. Again, I think it's important to show that you're willing to put something back in. We work really hard on this place. I do the sound system meself, the PA for the disco and things like that. It's good cos you can learn to do something that's different, as opposed to just knowing about being in a group. You're learning how a club runs. You gather a wealth of experience."

In the bowels of The Hacienda, New Order sat quietly with various friends and associates. The tables were covered with beer bottles and Rizla packets. Stephen Morris and Gillian were perched next to each other on a faded sofa, talking so quietly that they might have been conversing telepathically. Albrecht wandered over and said hello, looking quizzical and wide-eyed. "Anyone seen Hooky?" he asked.

"He went home," said Gillian.

"Hope he's here soon," said Bernard.

Two minutes later the door thumped open and Hook strode in, scarved and leathered. "Evening all," he said cheerfully. There was a sense of tension lifting. They were onstage in 15 minutes, and TV doesn't like to be kept waiting.

Factory supremo Tony Wilson flitted about busily, a brusque, fast-talking figure who likes to do everything at once. No doubt Paul Morley learned a thing or two from Wilson back in his Manchester days, like how to be too bloody clever for your own good. Without New Order Factory would probably bite the dust. As it is, the company remains a great Mancunian curiousity, a quirky throwback to the arty days of post-punk somehow threading its way through the revisionist mid-Eighties.

LIFE DURING WARTIME

WOULD you ever move away from Manchester, Bernard?

"Not at the moment. I did think of joining up when the Falklands conflict was on. That was the nearest thing."

Seriously?

"Patriot mate, I'm a patriot."

You'd really have gone?

"If it wasn't for the group and me family, yeah."

That's a very unfashionable thing to say.

"Yeah, I know it is, but I don't believe in bullying, I don't believe in aggression. I think Argentina was aggressive. It's real unfashionable, but they shouldn't have done what they did."

Have you got friends in the army?

"Yeah. Me cousin David is in the army. He's in Germany."

So does all this somehow relate to "Love Vigilantes", then (a tale of a soldier returning from the war)?

"Yeah, I suppose it does in a way. I believe basically that war's wrong, fighting's wrong, but defending yourself isn't wrong. If someone hit me I'd hit 'em back. I think most people would. Personal opinion, I mean no-one condemned the British for fighting the Germans in World War Two, and it was right what they did. It was fuckin' right.

"But suddenly it's not right if the British stand up for their own territory in the Falklands. It's easy to sit on your arse in a warm, comfortable living room and take one side or another, but the basic fact is that Argentina was aggressive and we weren't. They took the first initiative."

What about the argument that Mrs Thatcher went to war in the Falklands purely for political gain?

"Oh I think what Mrs Thatcher did was really bad. It's really bad that she's come out of it with credit. She should have been kicked out government because of it. It should never have happened, part of it was her fault, but nevertheless Argentina shouldn't have invaded a neutral or foreign country. It's like someone walking into your house and saying 'this is my house now'.

"I mean, I don't condone things like Vietnam. I ain't a fookin' military maniac. But if someone invades your country it's not fair, is it? People said the Falklands was over land but it wasn't, it was about all the British people who lived there. They didn't want the Argentinians there."

It might have been over oil, too. There's oil down there.

"Yeah, that's the perfect cynical viewpoint to jump to."

War's a pretty cynical thing. Seeing the Falklands veterans with melted faces is nauseating. Shouldn't we be past all that now?

"I think we should be past it. War is disgusting, it's really disgusting. But you've got to defend yourself. You're always right if you don't take the first action. It's the people who take the first action who disgust me. I've never attacked anyone in my life."

And as for "Love Vigilantes"....

"It's very tongue-in-cheek, it's like a rebel song but it's very tongue-in-cheek. It's kinda laughing at rednecks. From what I said you may construe it to mean that I am a redneck - I am not a redneck, I assure you, and 'Love Vigilantes' is like laughing at rednecks. The more ridiculous my lyrics are, the less serious the song is."

ROOTS

BERNARD: "Originally we came from punk roots which I liked because it didn't exclude anyone. It didn't matter what you looked like, whether you were fat or thin or ugly or beautiful. It was really down to earth, really down to earth. It was very anti-grown ups at the time but I think it was really good. We still believe in it and this is our way of showing that we still believe in it. We don't believe in snobbery, to put it simply. Or elitism. We've been accused of being elitist, which we're not."

New Order performed with transcendent power that night. They'd completed a string of British dates only a couple of weeks before, but already they'd completely rearranged the set and shoved in several impressive new songs. The Hacienda couldn't have been designed to make watching a group more uncomfortable. Balconies, stairs and the slightly raised dancing area were crammed and impassable. Ribs and girders block your view from several angles.

But you could still feel the sheer torque they were generating onstage. The veteran "Temptation" has never sounded better, a euphoric gallop of chattering electronics whipped by thrashing chords. "Shame Of The Nation", or possibly "Shame Of A Nation", will probably be the next single, and is as terse a song as the group have written.

The newest songs seem immense, giant structures of sounds encompassing long climatic instrumental passages. Albrecht doesn't have to worry too much about singing, and hunches twistedly over his guitar as his hands scrabble spastically across the strings. Hook does the splits, Iron Maiden style, over his bass. Gillian is improbably still, busy channeling New Order's new technology into strong glittering patterns, while Morris batters away at the back among his kit and his machinery. The sense of aimlessness they sometimes used to display has gone, and if the songs are getting longer now it's because the group have learned how to manipulate atmosphere.

AUDIENCES

PETER: "I don't feel any compulsion to pander to them, I don't see the point. Cos most of them are real c----s, they shout at yer, they scream at yer, they spit at yer, they throw bottles at yer. I mean, a lot of them aren't, it's like typecasting your audience, but the point is the ones who just stand there and listen you never get to meet, do yer? The fucking loudmouths who are throwing and spitting and screaming 'Warsaw' and fucking 'Transmission' - it's really boring.

"Some c--- tonight shouted 'Warsaw'. Must think they're being really clever. Dickheads. The world's full of people, unfortunately."

"There might be another Sex Pistols," said Peter Hook whimsically later that night. "We might be the next Pistols. What a nice thought."

You might be the next Genesis.

Hook chortled: "That's what a lot of people say we are. The next Mike Oldfield. The next Mike Oldfields. But it's a rotten business. I'm glad I'm out of it, to be honest. I watch 'Top Of The Pops' and I feel very far removed. The funny thing was I had real good fun doing 'Top Of The Pops'. It was a great day, really enjoyable, and even though it didn't sound that great because we played live, to me that was one of the biggest achievements.

"I watch bands like Orchestral Manoeuvres that started the same time as we did and were on Factory. They could have done exactly the same as we did, but they took the easy way out and signed to Dindisc and got a huge advance, and they were coming over and apologising to us for miming. Which I thought was really funny. Everyone did - KajaGooGoo and Human League, apologising to you for miming. Saying 'we wanted to play live but we thought it was a bit tricky' We must be striking something really deep within 'em to annoy 'em."

Stephen Morris remembers that day like this.

"We played live not really for any strong sense of commitment, like Keep Music Live or anything like that - it's just that we'd feel complete and utter prats miming. We're probably worse miming that we are playing, so ... we just don't want to mime."

In Morris's determinedly low-key version of events, New Order proceed almost inadvertently forwards, avoiding humiliation and self-abasement at all costs. They've avoided putting their name to the assorted good causes available to today's rock star, though they've done an AIDS benefit recently.

"That's right," muttered Morris. "We haven't really. There's things that are obviously good causes and deserve attention but we're not sort of fucking crusading about anything, really. 'Convictions cause convicts'. We try and be open minded, really."

The "Nazi" slurs flung at both New Order and Factory wouldn't have anything to do with this heads-down policy, I suppose?

"That just got to be a joke after a while because everybody knew it wasn't true," Morris responded. "We just used to get really really fed up with it. It's alright when it's being directed at you but when it's being directed at everybody or Factory, y'know, you feel a bit sick."

Why has the group got so good lately?

"We've just been working hard, I suppose. In fact, it seems like longer than recently. It seems like forever."

New Order re-invest a substantial amount of their income in new equipment, which sounds great but takes a bit of getting to know. "It drives me piggin' mad actually," said Stephen. "It takes up considerably more time than playing something or making something up. The time it takes is unbelievable really. You find yourself getting a bit more musical because you've got to communicate with a machine. It's got to speak a language, and the people who make the machines decided the accepted notation of music was the way they'd do it. You found yourself being forced to get a bit more musical, so I suppose we got a bit better.

"Fortunately we've got some reliable stuff now, it doesn't break down so much. But when it breaks down, God! One could have kittens. Sequencers and stuff you can do a lot with but they become... y'know, everything that you listen to has got one which is a shame, but people are funny like that. Everybody sort of leaps in on things like punk or whatever, and all of a sudden there's loads of things that are all very nearly the same."

You can get a glimpse of an earlier New Order in their "Taras Shevchenko" video, shot at the Ukrainian National Home in New York in 1981 (it's released on Factory's video offshoot, Ikon). The performances are rough but forceful, primitive stuff in comparison to the post- "Low-life" New Order.

"I quite liked that video," observed Morris, "because by the time it came out it was a historical document, it was years gone by. I thought it was quite good really, but I think the Joy Division one was better because it's got a bit more crudity about it. Some of the Super 8 footage is really good because it's tacky, because it's there, and it's not planned."

There was one question I had to ask. Why did Ian Curtis always look fuzzy or totally invisible in photos of Joy Division?

"He actually looked like that, strange to say," said Morris, unperturbed. "I can't say I've noticed. I can't stand looking at photographs. I don't really like looking at videos. It's like when you hear your voice recorded on tape, you go 'that's not me!' and videos are the same thing only worse. Oh God, No! I find it a bit embarrassing."

The group's changed a lot though, even since that Ukrainian Home video?

"Yeah. We went a bit high-tech. It's quite quaint cos in that video all that stuff was hand made, it's all held together with a piece of string, literally.

"There was nothing so complicated as a polyphonic sequencer or anything like that, it was cottage industry stuff. Not even a Drumatix (drum machine), it was before all that. So when the Drumatix came in, my God! You'd give your right arm for a Drumatix.

"We had gadgets when we were Joy Division, they were just slightly lower-budget gadgets. We used to have a little synthesizer and a little Woolworths organ which always came in handy for things, and the favourite of all was the Shin-Ei Fuzz Pedal so beloved of the Jesus And Mary Chain - yes, you're onto a winner there! A classic. It had 'Shin-Ei Fuzz' written on it, it was great."

POLITICS

PETER: "I think the only politics I'm interested in are Factory politics. Cos that's what's nearest and dearest to my heart if you like. I'm more interested in what's going on around me, that I can effect, than some fucking.... I've seen all this socialism bullshit that Paul Weller goes on about...."

Q: Why is it bullshit?

Peter: "Because it doesn't do it to the people around him. You go on his tour and it's just run like a normal rock'n'roll tour, rock'n'roll excess, everything that's fucking bad about it. And how he can fucking spout on about socialism and things like that and then he doesn't do anything about the things he can change in the way that he runs his business.... I mean, Paul Weller is a really big business, y'know what I mean, and he's got the power just with what he does to affect a lot of people's lives. Like what you meant about The Hacienda here. But he doesn't. It's like charity should start at home. You tell other people what to do and don't practise it yourself - that's really bad."

BERNARD ALBRECHT sipped his tea, then let his shoulders sag and sighed heavily. "God, I'm so tired," he said weakly. "This will be the strangest interview you've ever done," he'd promised as he led the way through the labyrinthine basement of The Hacienda to a neon-lit corridor about four feet wide. We sat in chairs facing each other. It  was like an interrogation scene from "Midnight Express".

"It's quiet her," Albrecht explained. He looked about 14 years old, and spoke in a fragile whisper. "Bernie's funny," said Mac once. "He just sits and looks at yer like he's a little kid or something."

I didn't dare speak too loud in case he dropped dead in front of me. The group had been holed up in the studio for a fortnight, working with American producer John Robie on some new material including a song for a movie called "Pretty In Pink". Robie, a regular collaborator with Arthur Baker, wrote the music for "Planet Rock" and Freeez's "IOU".

He was also responsible for the thundering 12 inch remix of "Sub Culture", a masterpiece according to some (me) but evidently a bone of contention within the group. Robie had cracked the whip over Bernard's vocal, and also added some belting girl singers to beef up the choruses. Bloody good idea, because Albrecht's voice, although appealingly frail in the appropriate dosage, has often been the weak link in the New Order equation.

"John gives you discipline, and then I can put my own expression into that discipline, whereas what I've been doing in the past is no discipline, just expression, complete expression. If it's out of tuen a lot of people won't listen to it. I do admit that a lot of what I sing is out of tune, but every single word, every syllable that I sing, I believe it whether it's out of tune or not.

"He's shown me that what you can do with vocals is to stress a point. You don't have to shout, you can use a melody to stress a point. He's just shown me another way of doing the same thing, really."

New Order maintain a delicate balance between the cool precision of their machines, Albrecht's erratic vocals and the occasional raggedness of their playing. Is it a case of deliberately pitting human error against microchip perfection?

Albrecht chuckled: "Not deliberately. Errr ... it's a difficult one, that. Don't know, I just do it. But I'm a bit of a lazy bastard so anything that's difficult I'd rather..."

Do you practice the guitar?

"Never, no. I never sit and practise anything. I hate it. But whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is open to debate. But I think us as a group and John as a producer suffer from the same thing, which is that we don't actually get recognised enough, but the people that rip us off get recognised more than we do. I don't like to name names, but we have been ripped off and the people who ripped us off are more successful than us."

But you're pretty successful anyway, surely? Does it worry you that much?

I don't worry about that at all but if you've got a chance to put it right you should put it right."

Is tenacity a Mancunian characteristic?

"It's everybody's characteristic. You've got to float on top of the water, not underneath it."

When the group aren't working, Albrecht claims to do as little as possible for long periods of time.

"I'm a complete and utter lazy bastard, and if we're not recording I don't do anything, I just think a lot, lie in bed and think a lot."

Do you read books?

"I'm really bad at reading, cos I read very slowly - I think very slowly, actually. But two years ago I decided that television was complete and utter rubbish, garbage, and that I should read more. So for the past two years I've been trying to read and it takes me six months to read a book. That's not a joke, it actually does. I'm very slow, I don't know why.

"The last full book I read was 'The White Hotel' by that guy D.M. Thomas, which is really good but it's disturbing. It's about a case history of Freud's. And I've been trying to read a book about Van Gogh called 'Lust For Life'. I just feel like if someone's remained through history, if they're still well known after years and years, then you should know about them. And I just wanted to know about him, even though it's a novel. It's based on his life, but it isn't all factual."

You say you're not elitist, but it looks like it sometimes. I remember a show at Brixton Academy where New Order treated the audience with utter contempt.

"No, I was contemptuous of ourselves, actually. It was the first time we'd played in like... these are things nobody ever knows, but it was the first time we'd played in three or four months. It was a really bad gig, we thought we played really badly. I just felt ashamed. I felt mad at myself, I didn't feel mad at the audience. When I get mad people construe it as being aloof and snotty, but I'm not. I get mad at myself a lot."

A perfectionist?

"No, I just believe you should put your heart into something if you're gonna do it. But partly it was my fault for having the wrong attitude. When you do a gig you should do it so that you enjoy the music when you're playing, enough so that you can play the music well If you enjoy what you're doing it's easy."