Cuttings

N.O. Future Manchester boys (John Brane and New Order de-basement Pete Hookes) cut the crap. ZIGZAG JUNE 1985 Jesus what is this cold and miserable place I find myself in? It's Rochdale raining, Sunday afternoon. Turn a few crumbly corners till I find Suite 16 studio once known as Cargo studios until Pete Hookes (bass player and public profile person of New Order) bought it. New Order — from cult status, Buzzcocks supports, long raincoat, Factory club, massive cult status of Joy Division days to the even more immense cult status they enjoy today (most of their audience unaware of their former incarnation) . I suppose it doesn't even matter. Why are they so sodding massive? A keen eye at the other scribes in the room gives the game away; they appeal to techno buffs who love to talk in numbers, as represented by a pompous nitwit from International Musician (Where else?) who spends his question time on REALLY interesting topics like the code number...

NEW ORDER: Blue Monday (Factory) NOT KIA-ORA but Sunkist, Quincy Jones gets to grips with the biggest-selling twelve-inch single that has shifted more copies than most of indiedom put together. It goes straight into the charts and New Order emerge re-freshed with a backing track for a bloody orange drink advert. Yep, it's a strange old world. Rumour has it that the lyrics for the ad have been adapted to run "How does it feel to drink Sunkist!" There is a fine irony at work here considering the frozen sense of alienated love that permeates the original. Whereas the former was ultimately as percussive as pistons on a Ferrari - a prototype hip-hop thingy - Quincy Jones has via his production filled in all the spaces with electronic gurgling, burbling, shouts, grunts and incantations. Some here at NME Towers believe that this is the ghost of Ian Curtis injected into the song via tape loops. Others believe that the death of the singer made room for New Order to deve...

The Observer Rivals fight for Joy Division singer's biopic Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent Sun 6 Jun 2004 11.54 BST First published on Sun 6 Jun 2004 11.54 BST https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/jun/06/arts.film For a generation too old to grieve for the loss of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and too young to hold a lighter aloft in memory of the late Marc Bolan of T Rex, there is another name that beckons from the rock'n'roll hall of tragic fame. Ian Curtis, the troubled frontman of Joy Division who committed suicide at the age of 23, is still mourned by his fans as the lost musical voice of an era. Now his legacy is to be re-examined not once, but twice, in rival films which are being developed around Curtis's life story. The Macclesfield-born singer, who died in 1980, had posthumous international chart success with the song Love Will Tear Us Apart, but was most admired among those who followed the Manchester music scene, of which he was a l...

NEW ORDER: Thieves Like Us (Factory) The little ray of sunshine who croons for New Order wants to get his Aryan finger out - every time I hear one of their gloomy, toe-tapping records it is patently obvious that the session has started without him and the band are doggedly plugging away, playing for time while they wait for the wee scallywag to show and then - when he finally arrives after three or four minutes of jig-by-numbers instrumental the scamp has the nerve to brazen it out, braying in that mournful send-for-a-priest-I-think-he's-going death bed moo, acting for all the world as though he's been there all the time! Or... was it all just another fiendish plot all along? Making us wait on tenterhooks for the vocal to heighten tension and thus see Obersturmfuhrer Vilson's total world domination? I guess we will never know. What I do know, however, is that New Order have achieved major commercial success because they are the only act around to have bridged th...

ANIMAL New Order: impenetrable darkness, enveloping gloom and clinging blackness. NEW ORDER Republic If The Smiths were the best British group of the 1980s, then fellow Mancunian miseryguts New Order were the most important. Their restless welding of successive waves of dance music and new technologies to Barney Sumner’s ever-improving singing and ever more personal lyrics continually redefined the edges of indigenous rock and pop. Many more commercially successful groups, Pet Shop Boys and The Cure among them, owed a debt to the sometimes meandering, always understated New Order. The band's last studio album, 1989's truly great Technique, a seamless meshing of synthesized rock grooves, traditional instrumentation and Sumner's plaintive lyrics, was largely hatched on Ecstasy island, Ibiza, and, along with The Stone Roses' debut, it remains the artistic peak of that whole UK acid/E/Madchester thing. Everything New Order have done since (the Electronic, Revenge...

PAINT IT BLUE 21st May, 1988 New Musical Express We check out the video for the new version of NEW ORDER's 'Blue Monday' and look back on how cartoonist RAY LOWRY interpreted the song when it was first released. “BLUE MONDAY’ may owe its resurgence in the charts to the unfashionable forces of Quincy Jones and Sunkist Orange Juice, but video-wise the song retains the accustomed credible credentials we’ve come to expect art lovers Factory Records; The video is a collaboration between American artist and experimental film-maker ROBERT BREER , and WILLIAM WEGMAN brought together under the supervision of Factory America boss Michael Schamberg. It's divided between animation (the work of Breer), and live shots of New Order and Breer's dog (the work of Wegman). Breer has been making films for over thirty years, but he's hardly a graduate of the Walt Disney school of animation. What sets him apart from other cartoonists is his use of 'flip books',...

LOVED IT AND LEFT IT Can you shed some light on 'Loved It (The Other Track)' from the debut album by THE OTHER TWO (pictured below). On first listen it sounds like just another instrumental with clever speech samples but I can definitely hear various quotes from Bernard Sumner, Hooky, Stephen, Gillian, Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson, such as " It was a big mistake", "How's it been hanging?', "It was the chairman of the board', "Not my idea" and "Any of you miserable musicians want any more?' plus a few others. My guess is that it's an obituary to Factory, possibly even to New Order. Am I right? Mark McNaughton, Rame Cross, Penryn, Cornwall According to those closest to New Order, the speech tracks stem from Channel Four's Play At Home , a series featuring bands in their 'home' environments — the Bunnymen at Liverpool Cathedral, New Order at the Hacienda etc.  Far from being an obituary to Factory, the com...

NME 16 November 1985 OUT OF ORDER New Order's ethereal movement away from Division and denial, through temptation and confusion, has finally arrived at the classical creations of 'Low-Life' and the emotional dancebeat of 'Sub-Culture'. But has success made the taciturn Mancunians less moody and more responsive? Cries and whispers by CATH CARROLL. Shadow play by KEVIN CUMMINS Without warning, Rob Gretton, New Order's manager, attempted to mount his new and undeniably attractive car. Adopting a semi-balletic stance, he spreadeagled across the bonnet and waved a hand-held cachet of infra-ref light at a spot above the empty back seat. Passers-by gazed anxiously. The locks on the door clicked opn - the alarm current had been at least been broken. Channel 4's popumentary, Play At Home last year showed New Order going wild in the country and Tony Wilson's bath tub. The popular notion that they spent all their time swathed in miserabilist mackintosh...

The Face, July 1983 Somewhere on the southern outskirts of Manchester there is a graveyard. Next to the graveyard is a rehearsal room where the four members of New Order come to practise their spells. The joke is not lost on them. "Maybe that’s why we sound so gloomy . . If we do. People say we do.” Peter Hook prowls warily around any definitions of the group or their music. His defensive skin is easily riled. He sits idly strummling an unplugged bass guitar. Propped on his knee is a US vis(a) application for New Order’s forthcoming tour. “Listen to this!” he shouts. “It looks like they’re on to us: ‘Have you ever aided in the persecution of peoples for reasons of race, colour or creed, including any involvement with the Nazi state ....'." Are New Order Nazis? The charge, which has surfaced before in the music press and was hurled at them again in a recent issue of Private Eye , appears to be dogging them. Well, are they? The answer is a bemused negative....

WHEN THERE'S NO MORE ROOM IN HELL NEW ORDER PROWL THE NEW YORK STREETS New Musical Express 23rd July, 1983 In the three years since they emerged from the shadow of Joy Division, New Order have become the world’s leading and most wilfully independent group. All without the help of Media “friends”. Now they don’t have to talk to anyone, they’ve perversely decided to open up. This story follows them from The Hellhole of Trenton, New Jersey to The Funhouse of New York, where they’re making a video to accompany their Arthur Baker collaboration. BY CHRIS BOHN PHOTOGRAPHY: ANTON CORBIJN SOME PEOPLE try to pick up girls and get called assholes. This never happened to Pablo Picasso. Not In New York. Visitors to The Funhouse, a Puerto Rican club on 28th Street between 10 and 11, would do well to heed Jonathan Richman's advice. Pablo's Spanish is the loving tongue here, but really it is physique that talks big with the locals. Bohn enters through the hideously mocking g...