re-issue sleeve notes press release

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4 Oct 2008, 08:45

Below you will find the press release for the sleeve notes for the re-issues,Warning it is quite long!

Low -Life

In 1986, New Order’s Shellshock appeared on the soundtrack of John Hughes’ teen romance flick *Pretty In Pink. “Barney and Hooky thought it was a girl’s film, but I think it did a lot of good in America,” says Gillian Gilbert. “And I liked it because that song’s when the band started using my riffs more. When you start off being an apprentice, hearing those bars on Shellshock made me feel I was where I wanted to be at last. We went to the premiere at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood and of course, no-one knew who we were at all. We sauntered up the red carpet and no one even looked up. That was what was weird. That’s what was a bit New Order-y about it.” New Order-y? Care to elaborate, Gillian? “The opposite of normal,” she laughs. “A bit weird, but listenable. Just… *different.” Different, it was. In early 1985, New Order had left Rough Trade’s US operation to sign with Qwest, the label being run by American production and soundtrack nabob Quincy Jones. Significantly, their debut album for their new home – labelmates included Frank Sinatra, George Benson and family gospel singers The Winans - would be the first to feature a band member’s picture. *Low-Life would also include massive tunes to equal the crowd-pleasers of 1983’s *Power, Corruption & Lies, and for the first time, singles. Jonathan Demme even directed a video for The Perfect Kiss in the band’s Cheetham Hill rehearsal room. “Low-Life was the going-to-be-big-in-America record,” says Stephen Morris. “This was when we really got introduced to the music biz. Later, too much touring was done, but you could see the point of it, because you *were going down really well in America, the records were doing well – we’d compromised and done a seven-inch version of The Perfect Kiss! And we were having a fucking great time. So we were prepared to give a little bit.” As would be expected of New Order, it was only to be a partial coming-out. Peter Saville’s sleeve came wrapped in a layer of squint-your-eyes-and-keep-your-distance translucent tracing paper, and the cover star was not logical choice Bernard Sumner, but Stephen himself. The image, taken on a Polaroid slide, captured him looking somewhat perplexed. This was a feeling soon to translate to certain onlookers, not least the Japanese fans that followed Stephen around Tokyo believing him to be New Order’s vocalist. “There’s been Stalinist revision since,” deadpans Stephen, “Go on Amazon and Bernard’s on the cover. If I see them in record shops I always change them back…” For the listener too, *Low-Life was an equivocal experience. The “weird band who played commercial music” had made one of their most stimulating and dramatic albums, full of fabulous highs and mordant depths. The Perfect Kiss may, as rumour insists, have been a vignette about AIDS, but it sounded desperate to live. There are also hints at psychological fracture (Sub-Culture) and the destructive consequences of tour weariness (Sooner Than You Think). But all comes wrapped in a musical package of such ravishing appeal that *Low-Life cannot help but sound upbeat. The first song recorded for the album was the beatless, future-Ennio Morricone instrumental Elegia, originally intended to be a freebie with style monthly I-D magazine. Recorded at soundtrack studio CTS in Wembley straight after an aftershow party at London’s electro sinkhole Heaven, its lengthy, simple sequencer riff amounted to an anti-matter Blue Monday (it’s full seventeen and a half minute glory, previously only available on a bonus CD with limited quantities of the *Retro box set, can be enjoyed on this edition of *Low-Life’s bonus disc). Stephen remembers an all-night session to record it, and an unexpected creative opportunity offered by the engineer’s two sons, which may serve to illuminate the band’s unconstrained methods of working. “The next morning his two lads turn up on the way to school to get their dinner money,” he recalls, “and Bernard’s idea was, ‘get them in the room, talking!’ So we said, go in and just talk, and they say ‘what shall we say?’ Say your names. So they did… ‘My name’s Justin’, ‘My name’s Ben’, ‘My name’s Justin’, ‘My name’s Ben’... Elegia was actually called that originally. They were on it for a bit, but not for long… they’re actually still there if you listen to the long version.” Work on the album continued at Jam studios in Finsbury Park, New Order’s studio of choice Britannia Row having been rendered unsuitable by a re-fit. Gillian remembers a relaxed all-night approach to recording that was conducive to creativity; “We used to start off during the day,” she recalls. “You’d have your tea and then before you knew it the cleaners were there at five in the morning.” Taking four weeks to record and two weeks to mix, Hooky commented at the time, “*Power, Corruption & Lies was recorded in a digital studio but we found the sound was too clean. *Low-Life was recorded with antiquated equipment because we wanted the dirtiness back, particularly on the lower, bassier levels.” Opening track Love Vigilantes is notable for being one of the few straightforward narrative songs in the New Order canon. Written in one day and featuring a melodica line inspired by the 1970’s one hit wonder Walkin’ With Mr Bloe, debate has raged since over whether its protagonist is alive or not. “I sometimes used to go on the minibus with the road crew,” recalls Bernard, “and one of the roadies, an Irish lad, had this country music tape, with all these corny country songs on it with funny lyrics. I just thought, I have to write a song like that. It was supposed to be dead serious, actually, a redneck song. Was he dead? I’m not saying, you can interpret it in your own way. That’s the question it leaves you with. Is he a ghost?” The rest of the group don’t know either. “ The interesting thing about New Order is that we never talked about music,” recalls Hooky. “We used to just do it, we’d never talk about it to each other. Quite odd really, maybe it was telepathy! On Low-Life, I remember being really happy when we were doing Sunrise. I though, ‘fuck, why can’t we write all the songs like Sunrise?’” Sunrise is the fierce rocker of the album, with a gold standard Hook bassline and lyrics that seemingly curse God for his failure to speak to his creations. Contrastingly, the highly energetic closer Face Up depicts rage followed by a kind of resigned compassion. “If you’re in a relationship where everything’s really nice and truly loving, you can get tickley feet,” muses Bernard. “And after a bit for no reason at all, anger wells up inside you and you have the biggest fucking argument ever. And afterwards you think, how did that happen? Why were we arguing? I’ve got this belief in life that we exist in a state of dualism. I don’t think we can exist in just one state. We need that anger to realise what it is to feel love.” There were, you suspect, opportunities to put this hypothesis into practice when *Low-Life was released on May 25 1985. The extent of the pressure on our heroes can be gauged from their workload around that time. After finishing mixing at Britannia Row, they had to drive back to Manchester and then go on tour to Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand the following day. “We were doing three versions of The Perfect Kiss,” remembers Hooky. “‘Rob had said, ‘Go and fuckin’ finish it! We’re going to Australia and it has to be finished before you go’…but for some strange, insane reason he thought he’d got a load of champagne in. Me and Mike (Johnson, engineer) stayed up for 49 1/2 hours…. Then the next morning when we’d okay’d it all, I had to get in the car and drive ‘em all back to Manchester, and then we were on tour for six weeks. Hell. A good job we were young.” Bernard recalls a colourful interlude during the tour when they spent five days in pre-Olympic openness China after a concert at Hong Kong’s Canton Club. The party drove into the interior with government translators and went to a restaurant where the menu was kept in bamboo cages and the toilet was a hole in the ground in the kitchen. As a result, they all got a strange Asian flu so virulent that Slim the roadie’s fillings fell out. Of course, their next engagement was a show in Tokyo that was due to be filmed. It would be commercially released by Factory’s video division Ikon in August 1986. “We should have been hospitalised,” says Bernard. “You felt like you’d been punched in the face by Mike Tyson. At the concert there was oxygen backstage, injections and stuff… and that was why it was called *Pumped Full Of Drugs.” Fortunately, things were looking more promising in the western hemisphere; in America, The Perfect Kiss had broken the Hot 100. Rob Gretton would tell an anecdote of the period about how he’d met Michael Jackson, and the then-megastar had known who he was. Compared to the concert halls they were used to in Britain, they were also playing bigger and better venues. “Loads of kids used to come in America,” remembers Gillian. “You were playing in the daylight to crowds of girls and boys. You’d look out and think… blooming heck. You could walk around and mingle as well.” Yet even here, contrary New Order weren’t entirely happy. Stephen wincingly recalls a world of meet and greets, handshaking and having to listen to *Low-Life in a big room full of US record industry movers and shakers, with a giant poster of the sleeve bearing his face on the wall (there was humour too; he recalls Rob asking the man who produced Michael Jackson’s *Thriller, “‘Eh Quincy, have you got any dope?! Got any grass?’ He didn’t.”) Gillian agrees the bargain may have been more Faustian than it first appeared. “On Factory you didn’t get anybody, you just got Tony coming in saying ‘oh yes, lovely! Sounds wonderful!’ We picked the singles, Peter Saville did the sleeve… but this was like entering another world.” There was evidence that the band’s public perception was shifting as well. Though the group were masters of the civil but unrevealing press interview, one of their more eventful magazine pieces appeared in Smash Hits around this time. It featured a photograph of a gaggle of fans clutching the shorts that Bernard was wearing on another picture on the same page. More seriously, Rob Gretton, New Order’s manager and fifth member, was soon to suffer a breakdown. “The thing is with the ‘crack America’ thing you have to go and do an awful lot of gigs,” says Stephen. “And that wasn’t a great experience. I’m sure it weaned Bernard off gigs forever. Hooky liked them. I didn’t mind. But it was just too much. And there was too much partying.” Though the decision to include The Perfect kiss and Sub-culture on *Low-Life may have contributed to both singles failing to enter the UK top 40, in March 1986 the band were back in the British singles chart with Shellshock. The song was co-written and produced by Arthur Baker’s associate John Robie, who Hooky says introduced Bernard to the concept of singing in key. “He said to him, ‘this song is in the wrong key for you, you should change it so it keys in with your voice’. Before he was straining, I thought he had a lot of passion in his voice because it sounded like he was sort of desperate. I thought we lost our angst after that.” Listeners to *Brotherhood, *Low-Life’s follow-up, would probably beg to differ, preferring to fall back on Gillian’s definition of ‘New Order-y’. It was still the opposite of normal, still weird, and still listenable. And even for New Order, different. Ian Harrison

Brotherhood

Peter Saville's New Order covers were always about taking art to the record shop racks. There were invariably clues to be decoded, mysteries to savour and functional beauty to admire, as with the music therein. One of his ploys for *Brotherhood, eventually to be realised on a just a few 'special edition' copies, was to have the album released in a sleeve coated with titanium zinc, an architectural material used for cladding the exterior of buildings, one of the most famous being the Jewish Museum in Berlin. When *Brotherhood was released in October 1986, a mere 16 months after Low-Life, it presented the most thorough synthesis of sleeve, title and contents of all the New Order albums. Even as a photograph on cardboard this looked heavy and foreboding, severe and indifferent. Redolent of Masonic secrecy, but also closeness, you wondered, what was this metal protecting? And what did New Order have to hide? The band who apparently didn't like touring had spent just four of the preceding 22 months without a concert engagement, and in April 1986 they'd entered Dublin's Windmill Lane studio to record their fourth LP. In search of a different, more secluded atmosphere away from the visitors who came prying whenever they recorded closer to home, they stayed in the country. A more significant change was to do something they had never previously formalised - they separated their rock and dance selves off into distinct songs. "Listen to it and you can hear it has two different sides," says Peter Hook. "There were battles raging on *Brotherhood." Bernard Sumner is more sanguine; "We'd always had that balance of electronics and band stuff. I was always pushing for electronics, and Hooky was always pushing for the band stuff, which was fair enough, I think we needed the band stuff. And by luck it got tipped the band way on *Brotherhood. It was a very dense album, because we'd gone a bit mad on overdubs, so it was very layered, and very dense." Stephen Morris agrees. "There's too much on it," he reckons. "It's very digital-sounding. We'd bought this thing called the Transdynamic, which nobody quite knew how to work, but it made everything sound really fucking hard! So it took out all the dynamics - made it all go grrr (pulls psychotic face)." These are ambivalent reactions. And anyone expecting another LP of bright, big tunes in the *Low-Life mould was to be largely wrongfooted. Yet however separated they may notionally be, the emotional range of rock and dance music's physicality were present in spades in these songs' energetic beats, rock basslines, classical-sounding synths and enigmatic lyrics. Take the soaring grandeur of Weirdo - a nod to the sound of *Power, Corruption & Lies - or the phosphorescent Way Of Life, a song whose guitar outro echoes Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart. There's also the tender synth rock of Bizarre Love Triangle, of which Stephen opines, "That was and is a real crowd pleaser, one that you'd feel bad about leaving out of your set. It's got that good combination of rock and dance, so everybody was happy. Those are the moments we strive for!" The vinyl-edition closer Every Little Counts, meanwhile, is surely one of their finest songs. Initially recalling Lou Reed, it includes one of their most luminescent instrumental passages and spirals into cacophony before ending with the now-nostalgic sound of a needle scraping across a record. It also contains Bernard's genuine laughter and attempt to compose himself while singing, "You look like a pig, you should be in a zoo." Was this what Paul Morley meant in his *neworderstory script when he wrote of the band, "Because they cared. Because they couldn't care less. Because you have to laugh. Because you have to cry"? And was this the kind of thing to help crack America? It's this line and others like it that have led some to accuse New Order lyrics of naivety. While Bernard's voice always worked as a component of the music, it wasn't easy to know what he's singing about, though the words have always invited interpretation. So it was on *Brotherhood. For example, is the possibly murderous narrator of Weirdo who pleads with a woman called Jolene the same man Dolly Parton is keen not to lose in her own song of that name? "I probably just thought it was an unusual name on some drunken level," says Bernard. "But that sounds better than my description so I'm fine with that." The album does seem to contain feelings of guilt, and present extreme situations. "I think that's true," he agrees. "On a personal relationship level, at the time, that is true. That's what my life was like. I couldn't have expressed it literally, so I expressed it abstractly, through the song. When I'm writing a lyric, the perfect analogy is the inkblot test (the Rorschach test used by psychologists to examine their patients' personalities and emotions). That's exactly what I do. I write music first, on my computer, and that's the ink blot - what do you see in this inkblot? The words come out of that. Pin the meaning down and you stop people relating to it in their own particular way." "But I'm not trying to be clever or to impress anyone," he stresses. "I don't wake up thinking I have a message for the world and it does not feel like natural state, wanting people to know my innermost thoughts.
To me, the 'meaning' in a song is the music - when I listen to a song on the radio, I listen to the tune first, if the rhythm's good, if I like the sound of it, if it's a slow track, if it's beautiful and touching... then I'll start listening to the lyrics." After working at Windmill Lane, the group returned to the UK to finish off at Liverpool's Amazon. As was their wont, recording went right up to the wire. "There was quite a lot of stuff on this one that got finished off in the studio," says Stephen. "I remember definitely doing fucking lyrics at Amazon, at the very end, all of us! Echo & The Bunnymen were next door, and Mac was amazed at us all sitting at the mixing desk, desperately trying to come up with words! Ha ha!" If only such uncomplicated jollity was the whole story. A point Stephen has made elsewhere is to do with the Byzantine system of assigning of Factory numbers; he notes that the ones following or preceding New Order releases were often of the frivolous, arguably white elephant variety. A case in point; while FAC100 was the *Low-Life LP, FAC 99 was an 'event' entitled 'Molar Reconstruction, Rob Leo Gretton's Mouth'... or, Rob went to the dentist. We are now obliged to inject a note of commerce to the story. At this juncture the band had been subsidising The Hacienda massively throughout its existence and were, perhaps unsurprisingly, beginning to tire of it. "I think we were getting a little bit jaded," admits Stephen. "The Hacienda opened in May 1982, so really all through this there has been an undercurrent of Hacienda-ness, of money, and the Hacienda never fucking did anything else other than lose money. One of the things that for me caused a bit of resentment was 'I'm doing all this touring and it's just all going to go whoosh! straight into the fucking black hole at the end of Whitworth Street West.'" "After you'd been in the studio all day trying to come up with a song you were having to get involved in business affairs," adds Gillian Gilbert. "Being asked, should we have hamburgers on a Thursday? You were involved in restaurants and clubs, nothing to do with music and being a band. The Hacienda was one of those things that hadn't worked, from the beginning. While everything we'd seemed to do with New Order worked, in a way." To us on the outside of course, this patronage of the arts was practical communism, the successful band giving something back to the city that had given them life, even beyond the bounds of sanity or solvency. "That was part of Rob's personality," says Stephen. "He'd just put fucking everything into it, he'd keep on going and going and going... that was the mentality. Double or quits, until he was starkers." Rob Gretton naked? Well, the manager who was always there, the fifth member of New Order who routinely joined in interviews, was anything but shy. "He did it all the time," says Hooky. "He'd take his clothes off in the studio, stand on the mixing desk and scream at you, bollock naked. 'Make it go WOOOMPH!" Ha ha! 'fuckin 'ell Rob what are you doing...' 'COOOME ONNN!' like that! ha! And eventually, we *would make it go woomph!" The uniquely unorthodox, but effective, mentality at the heart of Factory and New Order can be glimpsed in this. The other member of their guiding cabal was of course Tony Wilson, the late Factory label boss and figurehead who memorably also appeared nude in his bath presenting the 1984 ITV documentary on Factory entitled Play At Home. "He was a really encouraging and very creative person to have as the head of your record company," remembers Bernard. "He gave us a great deal of freedom. He wasn't a businessman, and that delighted us, but you need a bit of that for the finances to work. I it was more fun for us not to have responsibility, so we entrusted out responsibility to Tony and Rob. But they obviously had the same ideas as us. It was a comedy of errors really. Saying that, it was extreme fun. We did things in a different way, with freedom and fun, and it was really rewarding on a personal and creative level." "It would have been alright it would have been the little cottage industry thing, if the Hacienda had just been a little dingy club that didn't cost much. It was the scale of it all," muses Stephen. "Compare it to something like (label co-founder) Alan Erasmus' Factory boat, for example, which was half-submerged - fine! Or the Factory car he drove into the Hacienda. He lost the keys and couldn't move it so they bricked it up, there was a fucking car in it when they knocked it down. The Factory Zimbabwe label - another great idea! Nothing came out on it... actually, I think an Other Two single on a compilation album was on Factory Zimbabwe. Brilliant! Alan Erasmus, the voice of reason." Despite everything, New Order would continue to perform widely, and from *Brotherhood's release until December 1987 they would tour the UK, Europe, America (twice) and Australasia. We now approach an interlude in our reissue programme, August 1987's singles collection Substance having not been upgraded. Consequently, this expanded *Brotherhood extends, probably artificially, our reach into 1987's seamless True Faith and Touched By The Hand Of God singles, and Quincy Jones' frenetic Blue Monday 88 remix and its flipside Beach Buggy, a number three hit in May 1988. These three no-messing chart entries reminded onlookers of a curious fact; New Order had become famous as well as popular. "All of a sudden we were a pop band," says Stephen. "Radio 1 was playing us. Things seemed slightly more optimistic. We felt like we were an established band." And with *Brotherhood reaching number 117 in America, a more successful one. But also one that was still too particular, and too idiosyncratic, to go all-out for the kind of success that required three-year long world tours and industry game playing. Hooky said it again in an interview with the NME in 1987: "We are the only truly independent band." There was, however, something bigger coming than one band's stardom. An explosion in dance music was approaching, and within the year, the sound of the moment had converged with the band's own founding principles. New Order's reply to this would be heard on 1989's masterful *Technique. Ian Harrison

Technique notes

Stephen Morris has a way of dating New Order albums. While 1985's Low Life was being made there was the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in the former USSR, and the US space shuttle Challenger exploded. The later stages of Movement coincided with the inner-city riots of 1981. And just as they were about to play Buenos Aires, military unrest in Argentina marked the readiness of *Technique in early 1989. Human dramas all, just as the previous eight years had been crowded with incident. And the sense of distance travelled, from the dank precincts of 1981's *Movement to the fluouro-pastoral sheen of February 1989's *Technique, did seem astonishing. The place that gave this album its unique tone was, as in all things New Order, arrived at by total chance. "We had two candidates for a studio," recalls Stephen. "One was Peter

Gabriel's in Bath, which was fantastic. The other was in Ibiza, which Hooky and Terry (Mason, road manager) went to see. When they came back they said, immediately, 'We don't fucking care how good Peter Gabriel's studio is, it's not got a swimming pool, has it?' 'No...' 'Fucking go to

Ibiza! then!' Judas Priest's drummer owned it. It was, as Tony Wilson said, the most expensive holiday we ever had. But fortunately it was the right place at the right time. All of that was happening just down the road, in Amnesia and we embraced it, fully." 'All of that' was, of course, the Acid House/ Balearic explosion. The maddening, provocative sound of Acid had already hit the UK charts. It's quaint to think of the splutterings of rage engendered by, say, Lil' Louis' 1987 hit French Kiss, but New Order's Confusion had been, in much the same way, too much for some people in 1983. These were less songs, more super-heightened expressions of rhythm and sensation, concerned with hypnotic repetition rather than being 'proper' songs. In Ibiza, British and European youth were flocking to hear these sounds in clubs dedicated to non-stop ecstatic dancing, that stayed open until 12 o'clock the next day - an heir of sorts to the New York dance scene that had so besotted New Order in the early '80s. But as ever, there were hazards. "It virtually turned into a disaster because we were out partying all the time," says Bernard of their four months spent in Mediterranean Studios. "We didn't get that much done, basically. We'd go out to Amnesia instead. And the studio had its own bar and a 24 hour waiter fetching us cocktails and a swimming pool... there's more to it than that but it's not printable." Stephen takes up the story. "It was just after that Comic Strip Presents... The Funseekers," he remembers. "Which was a send up of all that Club 18-30-ness, with Jesus in it, so there was a sort of an undercurrent of that as well as this mad acid-crazed dance scene. To the point where we were actually running coach trips to the studio and having barbecues for the club 18-30 tourists... they'd be fucking running about the studio... throwing up! Ha ha! Terry'd gone out and met'em, and

then the Thursday night barbecue started, until it got beyond a joke. It was nice, but we did fuck all. In a way it was quite good to waste our own money, doing something that took your mind off what was happening with Factory." Gillian Gilbert's recollections involve more labour. "We had Mike (Johnson, engineer) with us, so there was always somebody doing something," she says, "but it was the beginning of us not being together in the studio when we were doing things. It was like, oh you do your drums today, and I'll do vocals tonight... The songs were sort of there but there were huge chunks missing. You'd leave blocks and say, will you fill that in? I'm off now. In some ways it was good because (adopts conspiratorial tone) you were left on your own and could do whatever you wanted. And people would come in and say that sounds dead good. 'Cos sometimes when you were writing it was like, I don't like that, why don't you do that ... but there was nobody there especially during the day because they'd been up all night!" From such confusion sublimity would spring. It's arguable that *Technique is more a clear split between rock and electronic dance than *Brotherhood was, but the two sides have serotonin-flooded, sunkissed qualities that make them more alike than apart. While Fine Time, Round and Round, Mr Disco, Vanishing Point and Dream Attack sit in the latter category, as do the instrumental extrapolations on this reissue's second disc, the vocal songs with guitars are infused with a similar sensuality. This was the first time Bernard had written all the lyrics himself, and it appeared that the Ibizan experience had also informed his words. Dream Attack is a beautifully poetic treatment of that feeling of never wanting to go back to the real world after a quasi-mystic clubbing holiday; the more bereft Mr Disco speaks for one of those Club 18-30 lotharios who finds himself without the lifelong soulmate he met one night when battered. After four months in Ibiza, it was probably time to go when gaunt Happy Mondays vibesman Bez turned up and started crashing cars. By cosmic coincidence, Bez was also the name of an ancient Mediterranean dwarf god of music and revelry who, it's said, gave the island its name. Who says there's no such thing as coincidence? Then band then adjourned to Peter Gabriel's still-new and gleaming Real World studio in Bath to complete what would be their masterpiece. "It was much more sober atmosphere," says Bernard. "Except when someone had the bright idea to have a party at the end of it, I think it might have been the studio manager, who was thinking of a cheese and wine party. I think we got a 70 seater coach from the Hacienda... Rob got the Hacienda

DJs, we did the place out like a club... and Bez came, again. Oooaaargh.

Good do. It did get messy. The poor studio manager nearly had a nervous breakdown. At 8.30 in the morning he said that's it, everyone on the coach, so we woke the coach driver up and he's like thank god for that, but the battery was flat! Yay! Back in until 11... heady days." On February 11 1989, two months after number 11 hit Fine Time had seen Bernard do his own variation of the Bez dance on top Of the Pops, Technique was at number one on the album charts. The month after that the single of Round & Round was at number 21. This was New Order's commercial zenith, and it left the way clear for other bands to blend rock and dance (U2 must have been listening), and predicting club music's chart takeover in the '90s. Behind the scenes, though, it seemed that the creative tension that had sustained and inspired New Order had finally given out. "I think Technique sounds fantastic. It really does, considering it's not an Ibizan dance record, I think it catches a summer sound really brilliantly," says Peter Hook. "It was funny. It was also a struggle - an epic power struggle between the sequencers and me. I was resisting it valiantly, because I still wanted us to be a rock band." "We were in this position of being known for this dance-electronic sound and it would have been daft to have just stopped doing it," counters Bernard. "That was the nature of the time. The way I saw it was we were still writing band music as well, so we'd reached a compromise. To be fair, doing electronic music like that has to be by its very nature one or two guys in front of a computer screen. ... I realise it was boring perhaps for Hooky to sit there while we were programming songs, but there was no other way round it. That was the sound that was happening at that time. I wasn't going to drop making this type of music. So, I went off to work on Electronic." By the end of December 1989 Bernard was, indeed, Getting Away With It in the charts in the company of ex-Smith Johnny Marr and the Pet Shop Boys. For now, one of the most beloved bands of their generation had suspended operations. They had, of course, done it at the height of their powers, having carved a unique place in popular music. No other group were so equally acceptable on the dancefloor, in the football ground, the art gallery or on your headphones in the middle of the night. Was it ultimate proof of their contrariness, to step away so casually from making albums at the moment of their greatest triumph? "It has a bit of an end of term, last day of school feel about it, doesn't it, Technique?" says Stephen, archly. "And then, just when you should be doing another one, you don't do anything at all! Yes, how New Ordery. I'm not surprised when people say they were annoyed with us. I felt a bit bloody annoyed as well! But... it's chemistry isn't it?" Gillian agrees. "We all had personalities, and that was part of the group. So you leave it, you don't force yourself, if you're not gelling." Early the following year, of course, there'd be the England World Cup song World In Motion; look further ahead, and still to come is gang trouble at the Hacienda, the demise of Factory, 1993's reunion album Republic and five years of solo projects. Bernard would carry on with Electronic, Stephen and Gillian would work as The Other Two would fit in two bands, Revenge and Monaco. Like New Order's regrouping in 1998 and the tragic death of manager Rob Gretton in 1999, though, these are stories for another time. "I remember one beautiful sunny afternoon when I took my son and daughter for a walk in Heaton Park, when New Order had finished," reflects Hooky. " And there was this kid with a ghetto blaster, playing this fantastic track. I asked him who it was - he said, 'It's fucking New Order man, Run! You not heard it?' I think that's a metaphor for being so close to something and not knowing your arse from your elbow. None of us, I think, are particularly full of ourselves and yet we've made some absolutely fantastic music, and written some amazing songs that have lasted so well. When you work as closely as we'd done for so long, you create things of immeasurable beauty that last for years and years and years, and you turn around and think you've done fuck all." "New Order/ Joy Division has been a slow burner," offers Bernard.
"Perhaps we didn't go, brr-paw!! Mega worldwide success, woah we've done it let's get a house in LA and a beach in Malibu, we didn't hit the world like that. People perhaps learned about us through word of mouth. Y'know, New Order can play anywhere in the world. Maybe some college kid played it to his mate and they played it to their mates, and the whole thing grew organically. Until it covered the world." There are many spine tingling moments on Technique, and on the ominously titled Vanishing Point, Bernard singing "when they gave him away like in Whistle Down The Wind" is one of them. It recalls the scene from the 1961 Disney-meets-Dennis-Potter British film when Alan Bates' fugitive - who Hayley Mills thinks is Jesus - gives himself up to the police in an act rich with symbolism. It's a farewell, but a disbelieving one that's convinced of a return. Rather like events after *Technique itself. New Order had gone. Later, they would come back. And in another sense, they didn't go anywhere. When a group makes music as good as they did in the 1980s, they'll always be around. Ian Harrison

Power Corruption and Lies

It was seven and a half minutes long, but even the BBC Radio 1 playlist found space for Blue Monday in the summer of 1983. Those who were transfixed by the frigid, rhythmic majesty of New Order's signature song included the Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant, who was so overawed he briefly considered giving up music after hearing it, and Eurhythmic Dave Stewart, who it made re-start a whole LP from scratch. It was that kind of record. Being New Order, of course, its creators didn't even bother including it on their next LP. But there was a sense that for New Order too, Blue Monday signified a new beginning and a farewell to old ways of working. The singles released around 1981's *Movement had all pointed this way, true, but they had been rock-dance hybrids with an accent on the rock. This was entirely new. Accordingly, *Power Corruption & Lies, an LP whose foreboding title you had to decode from a colour wheel on the sleeve, effected its own year zero. As evinced by Bernard Sumner's excitable whooping on opener Age Of Consent, this was the sound of a young band celebrating their existence. It was a process that, says Bernard, had begun two years previously. "We'd been recording in New York with Martin Hannett, and at night, obviously, we wanted to enjoy New York," he recalls. "One particular night in this one club, I don't remember which one, I was pretty off it and I heard a sequenced synthesizer track... and I just clicked. I thought, wow, it'd be great to hear one of *our tracks in a club like this. I mean, we weren't actually making club tracks at the time, but that was a real inspiration. You could call it an epiphany, I suppose. I thought, 'I want to make music like that.' It sounded fresh, like a new beginning, both from the point of view of club music and electronics. And we needed a new beginning. At the time, over here, it was crappy soul jazz-funk, really cheesy music, and even cheesier clubs. You'd be stuck to the carpet when you went in, and there were mirrors everywhere... real meat markets." Certain very important elements were coming together. By this time Factory and New Order had opened The Hacienda, AKA FAC 51, the iconic nightclub that had also derived its essence from New York clubbing, and which probably expressed the Factory aesthetic in its purest form. It wasn't far, then, from the fabulous NY pleasure-loft of Bernard's mind to the more earthbound latitudes in which to realise these new sounds. After vacating their old space in Salford, the group had acquired a new rehearsal room/ studio in Cheetham Hill. "It was behind the gas board and next to the cemetery, and it had no windows," recalls Gillian Gilbert. " The level that we were on was actually below ground, so we were at the same level as the bodies! We'd got into writing every day, instead of rehearsing three days a week, so we'd come up with more songs." "It sounded terrible," adds Steven Morris. "It was like an early Hacienda, we'd spent a fortune on it, to make it in into a studio... and

the acoustics were shite. Even the equipment didn't really work very well. But the idea was still 'how far can you take it?' And how far you could take it was Blue Monday." When recording time came, the band passed over their usual berth at Strawberry in Stockport to go to Pink Floyd's Islington studio Britannia Row , whose vintage desk was known for the vivid clarity of its sound and which had huge speakers for those immediate, in-the-disco playbacks. And much of what would appear on the LP was computer music with bold colours - powerfully rhythmic music with brains, intrigue and poetry that suited review in club conditions as soon as it was recorded. Perhaps a good way to interpret New Order's palette of influences at this time is to reflect on Gillian's memories of nights clubbing at Heaven and days on the tourbus listening to Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western scores, Wendy Carlos' Clockwork Orange soundtrack and Kraftwerk. Getting tooled up with an Emulator, Oberheim DMX and a Prophet 5 would also cause a considerable shift in the band's sound. " Got to give them their due, Bernard and Steve in particular, they were really exploring technology and sound," says Peter Hook. "What happened was they programmed the synths and the drum machine, then Mike Johnson and I worked on the production, so I did get involved. But there was definitely a change in style. It became a bit of a blend. *Movement sounded like Joy Division, but *Power, Corruption & Lies is the first New Order record. You have a distinct sound in that. That marriage of electronics with rock is a very unique sound. Tracks like Everything's Gone Green and Temptation led the way to *Power, Corruption &Lies." "We always ended up working nocturnally," says Stephen. "There was a lot of acid about, *Power, Corruption & Lies was a psychedelic sort of thing. You'd have a little bit..." "Apart from me," adds Gillian. In Britannia Row, the group would jam songs onto 4-track and then programme them, adding synthesizers and overdubs, and finally vocals. Age of Consent, the irresistible power surge that opened the album, was completed like this; the repeated pulses of Ultraviolence certainly sound like they was put together using instinct rather than foresight. The ensuing tension, generated by the rhythmic imperative of dance and the power and lyricism of rock, put plenty of fuel in the tank. Hooky's bass playing on the beautifully simple Your Silent Face, for example, interacts with the gliding sequencers like a dream. 5-8-6, an embryonic Blue Monday, has its mechanistic, symphonic disco moves undercut by tortured vocals. The somnambulant We All Stand is like the Peel session cover Turn The Heater On as narrated by Richard Burton's character in *The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. They were fusing rock and electronics when no one else wanted to, and the effects are electrifying. The amount of electronic gear also made concert performances a high wire walk of crossed fingers and ingenuity. "Oh God, we had so many breakdowns playing live," says Gillian. "It was like spinning plates anyway, and stuff would go out of tune and out of time because the power wasn't very good, and everybody'd look at eachother, or me! Or these synths that were made for being left in a studio with air conditioning on would overheat. We used to have condensation dripping on them and throw 'em in trucks! It was worth it though - we've been watching gigs that Rob used to video, and they sound fantastic, even the mistakes. There's one where Barney sings 'who killed my father?' (the original title of Ultraviolence) and you hear SKKKKKSSS!, the whole PA goes. Dead spooky!" The live New Order experience was shared by many millions on March 31 1983 when Blue Monday rose high enough for the band to invited onto on the BBC's chart run down Top Of The Pops. Introduced by jocks Richard Skinner, Steve Wright and a man in a bunny suit, this inscrutable performance saw Steven and Gillian immobile behind synths, Hooky adding syn-drums and backing vocals and Bernard wearing a denim jacket in honour of that week's fellow performer, rockabilly guy Shakin' Stevens. Though not as impressive as the recorded version that was painstakingly pieced together in Britannia Row, the incongruity and high weirdness of the event could not be denied. "I thought that was stupid actually," says Bernard. "Blue Monday was really breaking us, and it wasn't really a great song, I saw it more as an amazing sonic event. It's got this amazingly propulsive beat, a great bottom end - so to put all that time and effort into the production, and to then go and plug your little sequencers straight into the BBC's mixing desk, and they'd *never recorded a live band before on TOTP, it wasn't gonna be good. It was more Rob's idea, but of course he didn't have to go up onstage and actually do it. It was commercial suicide... but from an ideological perspective, it was good." To New Order, the ideological perspective was all-important, as a way to demonstrate their creative and promotional autonomy - that elusive, self-willed quality that meant you never even questioned Hooky's right to be bearded. It also completes a circle for this reissue's second disc to restore Blue Monday to its parent album, as on the original American issue of Power, Corruption & Lies. Cited as the biggest selling twelve-inch singles of all time, it is representative of the quality of this much-imitated piece of music that none of its many remixes have come close to bettering it's thunderous power. "If you hear the sound of Blue Monday," remembers Hooky, "It's down to us putting a speaker in the bathroom in Brit Row. We'd pump the bass drum through this speaker and record it! That's why the bass drum in Blue Monday sounds the way it does." A danceable Mexican stand off between you, fate and death, it's tempting to adapt nineteenth century biologist Thomas Huxley's famous quote about chess to be about the song: "Blue Monday is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the Universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature and the player on the other side is hidden from us..." Keep on dancin'. Present too is the Arthur Baker production Confusion, frankly shocking on its first release and still inarguable. This collaboration was another serendipitous event; having been piqued by Baker's electro-dance productions of Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock and Rocker's Revenge's Walkin On Sunshine, the group went to New York in 1983 without a pre-prepared song and, says Hooky, gave him 12 hours of jamming to work on after he put them in a studio for the day (later Baker's pal John Robie would also become an important part of the New Order story). When complete, Confusion amounted to being trapped in a game of disco-tetris surrounded by slamming piano lids; a de rigueur selection on New York radio station WBLS, its video was filmed in the Paradise Garage with Baker and Madonna's sometime-boyfriend Jellybean Benitez gauging the dancefloor heat from the DJ booth. Also reunited with its contemporaneous album is the Factory Benelux 12" Murder, a *Movement-flavoured blast of drums and noise featuring samples from the movies Caligula and 2001: A Space Odyssey, plus a whip cracking sound effect made out of string and gaffa tape by Bernard who had, says Steven and Gillian, taken to wearing a white lab coat at the time. "We'd got into sampling, that was the thing on *Power, Corruption & Lies," says Stephen. " We'd got the Emulator, which was like the first sampling keyboard. I remember it turning up in Cheetham Hill. All this technology, thousands of pounds, and do you know what the first thing they did was? Sampled a fart. Ha ha! It didn't appear on a song though..." The euphoric, bittersweet Thieves Like Us completes our revisiting of
*Power, Corruption & Lies, it's chorus of "Love, Love, Love" showing just how far New Order had come since the more shadowy climes of *Movement. "By this time we were much more confidant live, and we were all so much more confident songwriters," opines Hooky. "We'd filled the gap if you like. I look on it as a hurdle, because we definitely got over that hurdle that was in our way." Bernard agrees. "I think we'd found direction and that gives you confidence," he says. "I think in Movement we'd lost our self-confidence. On Power, Corruption & Lies we'd started to enjoy it again. We'd got over Ian, we'd started using machines, and life was good again." There would be new challenges ahead, with the following year bringing them a new label in America and a career in the ascendant in the world's then-biggest market. They were bound for high places, living the *Low-Life. Ian Harrison

MOVEMENT

When Ian Curtis died on May 18, 1980, few could have expected the surviving members of Joy Division to carry on. The exponential Growth of that revolutionary groups reputation and influence has shown How supernaturally good they were. How could Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris survive the loss of their singer and lyricist and escape the shadow of this band that had meant so much to so many?

We were all pretty shell-shocked about what had happened to Ian, says Bernard today. Suddenly we had to think about the future. And We didn’t have any answers.But we did know we loved being in a group And making music and playing gigs and having fun we were young guys, you know. I knew I wanted to do this. So the question was, what are we going to be? Are we Joy Division without Ian? Is that going to work?

Whether it was stiff upper lip, working class bloody mindedness, or young mens sure knowledge that music could be their lives, they Drew strength from being together, and carried on. But in the short-term, there were practicalities to be taken care of. Like, who was going to sing?

By June 29 1980, the three had played a short instrumental set at Manchester’s Beach Club; five weeks after that, they flew to America to play the shows that Joy Division could not. Taking the bold move not to look outside the family, all three members shared vocals, with manager Rob Gretton (who also tried out for the job) favouring Stephen for the role of singing drummer.

Rob’s thing was, yeah, stick the drums at the front Steve recalls Stephen. But I just couldn’t do it. I could play the drums and sing, but not necessarily in my own style, I actually started sounding like Al Jolson, after a while. I couldn’t be consistent. It came to pass that Bernard was vocalist when, in New Jersey in September 1981, they recorded their first single Ceremony and In A Lonely Place, both written just two weeks before Ian died.

In October 1980, the still relatively-untutored Gillian Gilbert, Stephen’s girlfriend who had once guested with Joy Division at Eric’s in Liverpool, joined on keyboards and guitar. New Order’s line was complete. Now they had to decide who, and what, they were going to be.

Released in November 1981, their debut album Movement was recorded with these questions still to be resolved. They would be decided in their usual studio, Strawberry in Stockport, with Joy Division’s visionary producer Martin Hannett. Previously, sound obsessive Hannett had cloaked the music of Joy Division in an icy industrial ambience. On Movement he was to bridge the gap between what had been and what was in the process of becoming. I don’t think there was a lot of time to reflect after Ian died, muses Gillian. We got very upset in Strawberry, we had to close all the doors you had people around all the time there, receptionists coming in and out leave us alone, y’know. We had to hide away for bit, because you were thinking about Ian who wasn’t there, and there was us lot carrying on, not struggling exactly but finding our place.

There was further tension in the air. Not only would the mercurial Hannett make sure the studio was air-conditioned to an arctic degree the official reason for this was that it was to stop diabetic engineer Chris Nagle from going into a coma, but he would freeze the band out in other ways. He didn’t want you there, at all, says Hooky. He didn’t like musicians, and his hatred of Bernard and I was quite Well documented. We told him, or asked him things, trying to give our opinion on things, and he fucking hated it! He used to stop and say get them two cunts out of here or I’m walking! Bernard is more forgiving of their first producer. Looking back, Martin was in a mess, I’m not sure whether that was because of Ian or because of the quantity of drugs he was taking, which might have been taking because of what happened to Ian, he ponders. He was very kind of obscure in his methodology in the studio, even at the best of times his approach was entirely experimental. His view was, the studio is an instrument, so let’s see what we can do with it. And because of that, he was a great catalyst in the studio.=94 =93Martin knew it had to be different, and we knew it had to be=20 different, but none of us knew what that different was, says Stephen. It’s here where you got the beginning of, the, sort of, are you rock or are you disco? Kind of thing? Disco rock? Rock disco?

Movement has had its share of critics, not least within the band itself, but compared to much of the guitar pop of now, it still Sounds thrillingly forward thinking. With Hooky’s stentorian bass sound, Bernard’s jagged guitar abstracts and Stephen’s fluid drumming Being so recognisable, it was unsurprising that they would carry echoes Of their former incarnation. The need to speak with a new voice, though, was as strong as the irresistible gravitational pull of Joy Division,and it made for a diverse album of post-punk energy, rhythm, Texture and experimentation. Bold opener Dreams Never End, sung by Hooky, was anything but retiring and sounds remarkably formed, while the sonar bleeps and echo of ICB bring out Hannett’s dub persona. Elsewhere the shadows are deeper, as on the murmured tension-and-release exercise for drum machine and melodica Truth, or the percussive, funk-powered solemnities Senses and Chosen Time. One contrast was inescapable; while Ian Curtis sounded sonorous and commanding, there are times on Movement when Bernard’s vocals see him give voice to the subject of The Him. Small boy kneels humble in a great hall. The thing about New Order, and Joy Division too, was that you could hear us learning in public, explains Bernard. Especially my voice. I’d never bloody sung before. The first time I’d ever sung, in my entire life, was Ceremony and In A Lonely Place. But who said life was easy? Again, I think it=92s a working class thing. You expect life to be tough. It seems peculiar now, but we just wrote from instinct, he continues. The less we thought we thought about it and the less we analysed it, the more songs we wrote. It’s like, if you don’t really know what you’re doing, if you haven’t grasped it, every time you write a track it’s like the first time you’ve written a track. That holds true, very much like my lyrics. Looking at it now, as a mature guy, I guess really what we were doing was writing from the subconscious.

After Strawberry they had extra work to do in Marcus studios on London’s Queensway, and later still, mixing in Island studios in Basing Street. Marcus was where Martin got really stroppy, Stephen remembers, that’s the famous not doing anything until the Charlie arrives thing. Which was a bit of a joke really but he eally wasn’t going to do anything until it arrived. You could do something if you wanted but he wasn’t going to. Willing New Order into existence was not a quick process. Gillian remembers the technological limitations of the time as casting her as the human sequencer. It was like on Chosen Time, she says. Bernard said, =91Just play these four notes over and over and over again We could do it quite quickly, actually, but it was a lot harder than it looks. Yet it was through this very human application> of technology that the sound of New Order was born. Hooky’s rock bass and Stephen’s metronomic drumming were given new and broader dimensions by the increased use of synthesizers, and with Bernard’s new role as singer, he too could go about establishing his own methodology. An enduring New Order tradition was established at the Album’s conclusion, too; having used various gallows-humour working titles for the songs Chosen Time was Death Rattle, for example good taste decreed that new names had to be thought up on the album’s completion. They really were just pasted on at the end, says Stephen. Which is the reason why Movement doesn’t make sense to us, is we never knew the songs by the names that they appeared as. I think Movement is a good record, says Hooky. Peter Saville (New Order sleeve designer) has a very interesting theory about musicians. He reckons that all musicians can’t write challenging music because they’ve learned how to write professional, good music. The thing is that when you listen to Movement, you can hear a lot of mistakes that shouldn’t be there. I think that Movement, even more than any other album, is very much about learning vocally and the way you use the vocals. Bernard wasn’t a lead vocalist, it was like you were using the vocals as another instrument really, which I liked because it was pretty mad. We didn’t have choruses; verses would be dead long; there’d be one verse with one chorus at the end a pretty wacky way of working really. Of all the albums in this reissue series, *Movement is most altered by the addition its second disc of contemporary singles and b-sides.

There are examples of transitional songs, such as In A Lonely Place Or Cries And Whispers, but others point unequivocally forward. Bernard’s voice is no longer muted on Everything’s Gone Green, which paradoxically came out on a single with Procession before Movement in September 1981. Occupying the rarefied juncture where psychedelic post-punk meets the Italo-disco fantasias of Giorgio Moroder, Bernard cites it as a signpost of where New Order would next. I think Everything’s Gone Green was struggling for a something new, he says. It came about primarily through me being very interested in technology. I’d become an insomniac in the process of being a member of Joy Division. Because we didn’t have any money and synthesizers were so expensive, I decided to build one, because I was into Kraftwerk. I’d be up watching films with a soldering iron in my hand, remember being in the studio with Martin in London one night, he was in the control room. There was an Oberheim synth in there and we had this drum machine hanging around, and I thought fucking hell, this thing’s got a pulse input, what would happen if I plugged this into the synth and started the drum machine up? And what happened was, Wow, come and listen to this Martin! That was the start of the new sound. Everything’s Gone Green, which Factory records head Tony Wilson once called the most important song in the modern world, was clearly no one-off. Similarly propulsive, May’s Temptation is one of the all-time great New Order songs, and came with a sense of ragged euphoria that would return in a more refined form two years hence on Thieves Like Us. Martin Hannett, though, would not be on hand to share in New Order creative rebirth. Martin did the seven-inch version of Everything Gone Green, I’d gone to bed, and Hooky and Bernard did the 12, remembers Stephen, Martin had had enough, he’d left them to it. And that was the beginning of the end of Martin, really. Having taught his former charges his secrets, the ill-starred Hannett would not work with the band again. In 1982 he took legal action for unpaid royalties against Factory, the company in which he was a shareholder. He would only be briefly reconciled with the label before his early death from heart failure in 1991. Yet one of his famously illogical studio instructions to the Joy Division - to play fasterbut slower=94 - foresaw the ability of the band that became New Order to unite competing, complimentary opposites in their music and still-forming identity. By 1983’s Power, Corruption & Lies, they s would be playing machines with more heart and soul than anyone before, or since.

Ian Harrison

TRACK LISTINGS FOR EACH ALBUM ARE BELOW. Previously unreleased material is in red.

Low-life (1985)

Love Vigilantes (04.18) (New Order) Warner Chappell Music Ltd. (P) 1985 Factory Communications Ltd.
The Perfect Kiss (04.50) (New Order) Warner Chappell Music Ltd. (P) 1985 Factory Communications Ltd.
This Time of Night (04.45) (Morris / Hook / Sumner / Gilbert) Warner Chappell Music Ltd. (P) 1985 Factory Communications Ltd.
Sunrise (05.59) (Morris / Hook / Sumner / Gilbert) Warner Chappell Music Ltd. (P) 1985 Factory Communications Ltd.
Elegia (04.55) (New Order) Warner Chappell Music Ltd. (P) 1985 Factory Communications Ltd.
Sooner Than You Think (05.12) (New Order) Warner Chappell Music Ltd. (P) 1985 Factory Communications Ltd.
Sub-culture (04.56) (Morris / Hook / Sumner / Gilbert) Warner Chappell Music Ltd. (P) 1985 Factory Communications Ltd.
Face Up (05.06) (Morris / Hook / Sumner / Gilbert) Warner Chappell Music Ltd. (P) 1985 Factory Communications Ltd.