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The Globe and Mail
Here comes the 80s: Too bad about the hair
Plaudits from younger bands and artists like Gwen Stefani have helped bring the eighties band New Order back into the spotlight.
In a way, the music of the 1980s has never left us. Like the albatross around the neck of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, or the pastel-pink sweater draped over the shoulders of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air's nerdy counterpart Carlton Banks, it's well-nigh impossible to shake off. During the nineties, we were supposed to appreciate it only ironically, looking back under arched eyebrows to a time when pop culture seemed less self-conscious, more wrapped up in its false sense of innocence. Now, the decade's pop, in all its earnest tunefulness and once-futuristic, synthesizer-soaked grandeur, is making an unmistakable resurgence.
In a way, the music of the 1980s has never left us. Like the albatross around the neck of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, or the pastel-pink sweater draped over the shoulders of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air's nerdy counterpart Carlton Banks, it's well-nigh impossible to shake off. During the nineties, we were supposed to appreciate it only ironically, looking back under arched eyebrows to a time when pop culture seemed less self-conscious, more wrapped up in its false sense of innocence. Now, the decade's pop, in all its earnest tunefulness and once-futuristic, synthesizer-soaked grandeur, is making an unmistakable resurgence.
By MIKE DOHERTY
Tuesday, May 24, 2005 Page R3
Special to The Globe and Mail
In a way, the music of the 1980s has never left us. Like the albatross around the neck of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, or the pastel-pink sweater draped over the shoulders of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air's nerdy counterpart Carlton Banks, it's well-nigh impossible to shake off. During the nineties, we were supposed to appreciate it only ironically, looking back under arched eyebrows to a time when pop culture seemed less self-conscious, more wrapped up in its false sense of innocence. Now, the decade's pop, in all its earnest tunefulness and once-futuristic, synthesizer-soaked grandeur, is making an unmistakable resurgence.
For the past few years, the most influential band in the world was arguably Joy Division: the post-punk movement spearheaded by the late Ian Curtis and his Mancunian mates in the late seventies gave rise to a whole wave of frenetically funky groups with stripped-down sounds. Now, it would seem New Order, the more accessible band formed in the wake of Curtis's suicide, is in the ascendant. The group's 1983 single Blue Monday was originally designed as a test for its new drum machines, but it became a huge club hit that cemented the band's cross-pollination of indie rock and technology-driven dance music. This hybrid has had a huge impact on a current crop bands. Yet New Order have always tended to be temperamentally out of step. They're enigmatic, wry and experimental -- qualities that haven't been embraced by many bands following in their wake.
Take the Killers, for instance. The Las Vegas act, who have sold nearly three-million copies of last year's debut album Hot Fuss worldwide, named themselves after a group of models miming the song Crystal in a New Order video, a spot-on parody of overly image-conscious acts. In the band's bio, singer Brandon Flowers says, "It gave me the ambition that our actual band should be as perfect as their fictional band," apparently oblivious to the video's irony. Their 1980s-revival rivals and Island Records label-mates, the Bravery, rose to fame this year with their debut single, An Honest Mistake, which sounds like Blue Monday being given a makeover by a straight-faced, testosterone-fuelled bar band. This past weekend, both bands shared the bill and presumably continued their war of words (the Killers claim they rediscovered the 1980s first; the Bravery claim they scare the Killers) at KROQ's aptly named concert "Weenie Roast" in Los Angeles.
Then there's the more artistically minded Bloc Party, whose music seems to rest somewhere between late Joy Division and early New Order, with a dose of the Cure thrown in; listen to New Order bassist Peter Hook, and he'll tell you how much Robert Smith's gloom-pop purveyors borrowed from his own band to begin with. Hot on the heels of all the above are such bands as Battle, Editors and Apartment, recently featured in an NME magazine story about the "brightest young indie bands" who "are using the music of New Order and Joy Division as a blueprint for their sound."
And what does New Order make of all this? Speaking from Oakland, Calif., last month just before his band's first concert in three years, Hook told The Globe and Mail, "It's an impossible situation to sit there and think: 'Oh, let's do a band that influences people.' People thank you all the time -- it's very embarrassing. You don't need thanks. My God, I've had a fantastic time being in this group; I've had a fantastic time being a musician. And really, people buying your records, most of the time, is thanks enough."
Surely, however, both go hand in hand. Plaudits from younger bands, as well as Gwen Stefani, who borrowed Hook and singer Bernard Sumner for a track on her solo debut, have helped bring New Order into the spotlight they relinquished after going on a rather acrimonious hiatus in 1993. Their 2001 comeback album, Get Ready, was a hard-hitting and vibrant album, but it was largely overlooked; this year's Waiting for the Sirens' Call, has garnered much more attention.
When they were recording Get Ready, Hook recalls feeling "a bit of pressure on us to be different. Our idea of returning was to try to either look back to Joy Division and be simpler, more straightforward, or to look forward to how we'd be without keyboards or synthesizers. I think unduly we were worried, because when we came back, everyone just wanted us to be New Order. This time, we felt more like we had carte blanche to do what we like, really -- to just be ourselves."
It seems, now, that New Order are making the right music at the right time. But is there any cultural reason for the recent popularity of their sound? Hook demurs. "I prefer to think that music is cyclic," he says. "I agree with Tony Wilson from [New Order's 1980s label] Factory; he said that you've heard it all before. If you look at the way The Rolling Stones started recycling blues music, it's the same thing. It's not just happening now with eighties music; it's happened right the way through. The clothes weren't great, were they? The hairstyles certainly weren't great from the photos I've seen of meself! God knows it can't be bloody cultural, can it?"
Even Joy Division, a band so singular they seemed to have sprung fully formed from the head of their lead singer, were part of a musical cycle; Hook remembers when people started comparing his early band to The Doors. "Ian used to say to Bernard and I that we did sound like The Doors. We were going, 'Who are The Doors?' He gave us some Doors LPs, and lo and behold, we did like The Doors! We actually started playing Riders on the Storm as Joy Division, as a joke. Nobody noticed!"
In the latest musical cycle, other acts who found fame in the eighties are being referenced by newer bands. Also influential -- for better or worse -- are the likes of Erasure (on New York state's Elkland), Rick Springfield (New York City's Action Action), The Knack (Vancouver's Hot Hot Heat), Talking Heads (Montreal's The Arcade Fire), and synth pioneers Kraftwerk, whose 1970s work influenced New Order and whose 1981 single Computer Love is interpolated by Coldplay into their new song Talk.
But while the gazillion-selling Coldplay have changed the oddball song about a "data date" into an earnest, inspirational track, New Order have celebrated Kraftwerk as being everything Bernard Sumner wanted his band to be: "rhythmic, abstract, aesthetic, arty, [screwed]-up and with a sense of humour," as he told Uncut magazine.
Add hedonistic to the list, and you have a good description of the multidimensional band who called a video of a 1985 performance in Japan Pumped Full of Drugs. These days, according to Hook, New Order have slowed down. "As you get older," he admits, "you physically can't do it [drugs]. A lot of people I know that went through the eighties mentally can't do it. As with anything, it's only experience that teaches you the things you can and can't do. We act pretty much the same as a bunch of 49-year-olds would. They do it once a month, don't they, or once every couple of months, or just at Christmas. You have to leave all the madness to the 25-year-olds, who'll be saying exactly what we said in 25 years."
But where will this hedonism come from? Chris Martin is an avowed teetotaller, while The Killer's Flowers is a strict Mormon. Perhaps, in the end, a dose of unashamedly melodic eighties pop is all the escape anyone really needs.
For now, New Order are no longer looking back. Hook says they've got a selection of killer tracks left over from the Sirens' Call sessions; he's keen to put paid to at least one long-held truism about his band: its notoriously slow work rate. "Our idea," he says, "is to finish up the tracks at the end of the year and get another LP out next year. So nobody will be able to call us 'The Old New Order.' "
Tuesday, May 24, 2005 Page R3
Special to The Globe and Mail
In a way, the music of the 1980s has never left us. Like the albatross around the neck of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, or the pastel-pink sweater draped over the shoulders of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air's nerdy counterpart Carlton Banks, it's well-nigh impossible to shake off. During the nineties, we were supposed to appreciate it only ironically, looking back under arched eyebrows to a time when pop culture seemed less self-conscious, more wrapped up in its false sense of innocence. Now, the decade's pop, in all its earnest tunefulness and once-futuristic, synthesizer-soaked grandeur, is making an unmistakable resurgence.
For the past few years, the most influential band in the world was arguably Joy Division: the post-punk movement spearheaded by the late Ian Curtis and his Mancunian mates in the late seventies gave rise to a whole wave of frenetically funky groups with stripped-down sounds. Now, it would seem New Order, the more accessible band formed in the wake of Curtis's suicide, is in the ascendant. The group's 1983 single Blue Monday was originally designed as a test for its new drum machines, but it became a huge club hit that cemented the band's cross-pollination of indie rock and technology-driven dance music. This hybrid has had a huge impact on a current crop bands. Yet New Order have always tended to be temperamentally out of step. They're enigmatic, wry and experimental -- qualities that haven't been embraced by many bands following in their wake.
Take the Killers, for instance. The Las Vegas act, who have sold nearly three-million copies of last year's debut album Hot Fuss worldwide, named themselves after a group of models miming the song Crystal in a New Order video, a spot-on parody of overly image-conscious acts. In the band's bio, singer Brandon Flowers says, "It gave me the ambition that our actual band should be as perfect as their fictional band," apparently oblivious to the video's irony. Their 1980s-revival rivals and Island Records label-mates, the Bravery, rose to fame this year with their debut single, An Honest Mistake, which sounds like Blue Monday being given a makeover by a straight-faced, testosterone-fuelled bar band. This past weekend, both bands shared the bill and presumably continued their war of words (the Killers claim they rediscovered the 1980s first; the Bravery claim they scare the Killers) at KROQ's aptly named concert "Weenie Roast" in Los Angeles.
Then there's the more artistically minded Bloc Party, whose music seems to rest somewhere between late Joy Division and early New Order, with a dose of the Cure thrown in; listen to New Order bassist Peter Hook, and he'll tell you how much Robert Smith's gloom-pop purveyors borrowed from his own band to begin with. Hot on the heels of all the above are such bands as Battle, Editors and Apartment, recently featured in an NME magazine story about the "brightest young indie bands" who "are using the music of New Order and Joy Division as a blueprint for their sound."
And what does New Order make of all this? Speaking from Oakland, Calif., last month just before his band's first concert in three years, Hook told The Globe and Mail, "It's an impossible situation to sit there and think: 'Oh, let's do a band that influences people.' People thank you all the time -- it's very embarrassing. You don't need thanks. My God, I've had a fantastic time being in this group; I've had a fantastic time being a musician. And really, people buying your records, most of the time, is thanks enough."
Surely, however, both go hand in hand. Plaudits from younger bands, as well as Gwen Stefani, who borrowed Hook and singer Bernard Sumner for a track on her solo debut, have helped bring New Order into the spotlight they relinquished after going on a rather acrimonious hiatus in 1993. Their 2001 comeback album, Get Ready, was a hard-hitting and vibrant album, but it was largely overlooked; this year's Waiting for the Sirens' Call, has garnered much more attention.
When they were recording Get Ready, Hook recalls feeling "a bit of pressure on us to be different. Our idea of returning was to try to either look back to Joy Division and be simpler, more straightforward, or to look forward to how we'd be without keyboards or synthesizers. I think unduly we were worried, because when we came back, everyone just wanted us to be New Order. This time, we felt more like we had carte blanche to do what we like, really -- to just be ourselves."
It seems, now, that New Order are making the right music at the right time. But is there any cultural reason for the recent popularity of their sound? Hook demurs. "I prefer to think that music is cyclic," he says. "I agree with Tony Wilson from [New Order's 1980s label] Factory; he said that you've heard it all before. If you look at the way The Rolling Stones started recycling blues music, it's the same thing. It's not just happening now with eighties music; it's happened right the way through. The clothes weren't great, were they? The hairstyles certainly weren't great from the photos I've seen of meself! God knows it can't be bloody cultural, can it?"
Even Joy Division, a band so singular they seemed to have sprung fully formed from the head of their lead singer, were part of a musical cycle; Hook remembers when people started comparing his early band to The Doors. "Ian used to say to Bernard and I that we did sound like The Doors. We were going, 'Who are The Doors?' He gave us some Doors LPs, and lo and behold, we did like The Doors! We actually started playing Riders on the Storm as Joy Division, as a joke. Nobody noticed!"
In the latest musical cycle, other acts who found fame in the eighties are being referenced by newer bands. Also influential -- for better or worse -- are the likes of Erasure (on New York state's Elkland), Rick Springfield (New York City's Action Action), The Knack (Vancouver's Hot Hot Heat), Talking Heads (Montreal's The Arcade Fire), and synth pioneers Kraftwerk, whose 1970s work influenced New Order and whose 1981 single Computer Love is interpolated by Coldplay into their new song Talk.
But while the gazillion-selling Coldplay have changed the oddball song about a "data date" into an earnest, inspirational track, New Order have celebrated Kraftwerk as being everything Bernard Sumner wanted his band to be: "rhythmic, abstract, aesthetic, arty, [screwed]-up and with a sense of humour," as he told Uncut magazine.
Add hedonistic to the list, and you have a good description of the multidimensional band who called a video of a 1985 performance in Japan Pumped Full of Drugs. These days, according to Hook, New Order have slowed down. "As you get older," he admits, "you physically can't do it [drugs]. A lot of people I know that went through the eighties mentally can't do it. As with anything, it's only experience that teaches you the things you can and can't do. We act pretty much the same as a bunch of 49-year-olds would. They do it once a month, don't they, or once every couple of months, or just at Christmas. You have to leave all the madness to the 25-year-olds, who'll be saying exactly what we said in 25 years."
But where will this hedonism come from? Chris Martin is an avowed teetotaller, while The Killer's Flowers is a strict Mormon. Perhaps, in the end, a dose of unashamedly melodic eighties pop is all the escape anyone really needs.
For now, New Order are no longer looking back. Hook says they've got a selection of killer tracks left over from the Sirens' Call sessions; he's keen to put paid to at least one long-held truism about his band: its notoriously slow work rate. "Our idea," he says, "is to finish up the tracks at the end of the year and get another LP out next year. So nobody will be able to call us 'The Old New Order.' "
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