By Tom Lanham (The Wave Magazine)
For a guy turning 50 next year, Bernard Sumner is looking pretty darned good. Lazing around the restaurant of the posh New York hotel Soho Grand, the singer for techno-pop progenitors New Order is youthfully trim, decked out in a scholarly turtleneck sweater, brown corduroys and Velcroed Adidas, his tousled brown hair flecked with only the tiniest bit of gray at the temples. Sure, he’s been making music for 30 years, he’ll admit – but he still feels like the same Mancunian kid who almost singlehandedly launched the goth-rock movement with the late, lamented Joy Division (whose singer Ian Curtis committed suicide in 1980, pushing Sumner to frontman status of the subsequent New Order). And the band’s latest hyper-kinetic outing, Waiting For The Sirens’ Call, feels boyishly energetic, especially on the signature bass-thumping single “Krafty,” which echoes the band’s classic “Blue Monday" / "Bizarre Love Triangle” work. How does this father of three stay so hip? Read on...
The Wave: We’ve heard that you know your own sound so well that you’ll sometimes stop a track, mid-recording, by saying “No – that just sounds too New Order-y.”
Bernard Sumner: Well, I know that we’re not scared of sounding like New Order, but I just don’t think that we wanna repeat ourselves. That’s what we’re scared of. Like, we never did another “Blue Monday.” Stupidly. But we don’t wanna repeat ourselves, so every track becomes really challenging, just to put a new twist on it, really.
TW: And every band in the world now, from The Killers to Dirty Vegas, cites you as a key influence. Even longtime fan Gwen Stefani had to have you play on her new solo album.
BS: Yeah – she asked us to write a track for her. But we’d just gone into the recording studio for “Siren,” and if we were gonna get a good track, we didn’t want to give it away to someone else, no matter who it was. And we didn’t want to give Gwen a castoff track, either, so we didn’t know what to do. And then she sent us over the track we did and said, “Will you play on this?” So I did some backing vocals on it and Hooky (Peter Hook) played some bass on it. But really, in an ideal world, we would like to write her a track. It was just that the timing was bad.
TW: On your last tour four years ago, you actually – for the first time since Ian died – resurrected some Joy Division tracks. They sounded incredible.
BS: Well, for a long time it was just taboo for us to play Joy Division songs. Two reasons for that: One is that we wanted to stand up on our own two feet, and not on the back of Joy Division. We wanted to make it under our own steam as a group. Once we’d done that – made New Order an entity in its own right – we finally felt comfortable playing Joy Division songs again. Another reason is, this May it’s been 25 years since Ian committed suicide, and I think playing the Joy Division songs is a wonderful way of keeping his memory alive. And the thing about Joy Division songs is, they don’t date. They’re so timeless. Especially “Atmosphere” – “Atmosphere” is my favorite Joy Division song, and “Temptation” is my favorite New Order song. And those two songs have both got this timeless quality to ’em.
TW: New Order’s early Power, Corruption And Lies album feels the same way – ageless. It still sounds like it was recorded only yesterday.
BS: I think one of the reasons for that is that we’ve never been part of any movement. By luck or by chance, more than by determination, we’ve always skipped movements. We came around after punk; we were post-punk. And we were before New Wave, so when New Wave hit we had nothing to do with that. And then Britpop – again, nothing to do with it. If you’re part of a movement, part of a wave of groups, it’s great because you get a press feeding frenzy. But when that wave hits the beach and the movement’s over, then the groups are over. So we were fortunate that we’ve never been part of a scene. Because when the movement dies, if it doesn’t destroy the group, then the group is always related to those years when that scene was big. A movement timestamps you, always timestamps you.
(Mike on your left)
