1986 10 Mix New Order Feature
INTERVIEW: CHRIS HEATH It's easy, looking back, to see how New Order became so mysterious, to see why they've managed over the years to give so little away. Back in the late '70s when the three male members were in Joy Division no-one wanted to talk (or listen) to them, and when eventually they did achieve a small measure of success it was to singer and lyricist Ian Curtis that journalists flocked. He danced on stage as if repeatedly jolted by an electric prod in his spine and wrote dark brooding melodramas that he refused to explain — people automatically assumed that he was the group's genius. The other three, whatever they were called, were by and large treated as the able backing musicians, the channel through which Curtis' genius was allowed to explode (never mind that, even then, they wrote all the music). Their silence was only hardened when Curtis died in 1980 — hanging himself one evening in circumstances which no-one has been able to, or more likel...