About the Book
Founding member and guitarist of Joy Division, lead singer of New Order and an integral part of the Manchester music scene since the late 1970s, Bernard Sumner has over the years been famously reluctant to speak out. Until now... In Chapter and Verse, Bernard tells the definitive story behind two of the most influential bands of all time.
The book includes a vivid and illuminating account of Bernard’s Salford childhood, the inception and demise of Joy Division, the band’s enormous critical and popular success, and the subsequent tragic death of Ian Curtis. Bernard describes the formation of New Order, and takes us behind the scenes at the birth of classics from both bands such as ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, ‘Atmosphere’, ‘Blue Monday’ and ‘World In Motion’. And he gives his first-hand account of the ecstasy and the agony of the Haçienda days.
Sometimes moving, often hilarious and occasionally out of control, this is a tale populated by some of the most colourful and creative characters in music history, such as Ian Curtis, Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton and Martin Hannett. Some of these events have appeared before in film and book form. But now, for the first time, Bernard Sumner tells the whole story – the Haçienda, Joy Division and New Order – in one book, Chapter and Verse.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Time
Preface
Chapter One: Streetlights
Chapter Two: Youth
Chapter Three: Complex
Chapter Four: Scumbags
Chapter Five: Rebellion
Chapter Six: Awaking
Chapter Seven: The organization
Chapter Eight: Cold winds blowing
Chapter Nine: Graft
Chapter Ten: Agecroft to Islington and that fateful day
Chapter Eleven: A new sound in a new town
Chapter Twelve: Resurrection
Chapter Thirteen: Here comes success
Chapter Fourteen: New York, London, Los Angeles, Knutsford
Chapter Fifteen: I’ve got an idea
Chapter Sixteen: Too much drink, but not enough to lose
Chapter Seventeen: We’re singing for England
Chapter Eighteen: Burn bright, live long
Chapter Nineteen: The tempest
Chapter Twenty: ‘It’s a disturbing story, there’s no way round it’
Chapter Twenty-One: ‘No matter what you say or who you are, it’s what you do that matters’
Chapter Twenty-Two: The epilogue
Postscript
Picture Section
Appendix One: Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner hypnosis recording
Appendix Two: A Conversation with Alan Wise
Picture Acknowledgements
Index
About the Authors
Copyright
My family
The band
Loyal friends, collaborators
and all those who have passed away
Ian, Martin, Rob, Tony
Acknowledgements
Charlie Connelly
Doug Young
Kevin Conroy Scott
Lizzy Kremer
Alison Barrow
Jack Delaney
Rebecca Boulton and Andy Robinson
Time
Time is a curious thing. When you have it before you, it’s something you take for granted and it moves slowly. Then, as you get older, it accelerates. When I look back, it seems such a long distance travelled, so long ago, so dream-like.
January 1956 on a cold grey northern winter’s day I was born in a Manchester hospital called Crumpsall. I can only imagine what Manchester was like in the fifties: black and white, grainy, weird-looking cars and black vans with austere headlamps and radiator grilles, fog, the Midland Hotel, the Central Library, the River Irwell, the bad food, the rain. So I moved to Salford, five miles away.
I lived at 11 Alfred Street, Lower Broughton, Salford 7, red front door, a terraced house in the middle of a community of mostly decent working-class people. My family consisted of my mother, Laura, my grandmother, Laura, and my grandfather, John, and they were all called Sumner.
Of course, I don’t remember much about those so-called formative years, but please see the embarrassing photographs. My earliest memory is of sitting on a brown couch playing with a red and cream plastic guitar that said ‘Teen Time’ on it.
So that’s how it started.
Preface
As I write this, I’m preparing to travel to South America with New Order for gigs in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. We’ve never particularly promoted ourselves in those countries – in fact, we’ve never particularly promoted ourselves anywhere outside the UK to any great extent – yet we’ll be playing to packed houses in cities about as far in every sense from our Manchester origins as you could possibly imagine.
Joy Division and New Order are international phenomena. Our music has permeated the globe and I’m not sure how or why this has happened: neither group could be described as a conventional pop band churning out hits and earning lots of Top Forty radio airplay. Yet for some reason we’ve built up a vast and loyal global following that shows no sign of diminishing any time soon, even in the most unlikely settings: only recently, I was at home watching news footage from the Middle East of people running for shelter from a missile attack when a teenage girl ran past the camera wearing an Unknown Pleasures T-shirt.
The longevity of the music is something that consistently astounds me. Joy Division started in 1977, and here we are, more than three decades later, as popular as we’ve ever been, winning over whole new generations and finding new audiences. On our recent tour I asked some fans in their teens how they discovered New Order. Usually their big brother or sister had introduced them to us, or they’d raided their parents’ record collections and liked what they heard, which is fantastic to hear.
All this makes these exciting times for New Order. The last few years have proved to be among the busiest and most successful – and in many ways the most enjoyable – in the three-decade history of the band. What began as a couple of charity gigs in 2011 grew into a clutch of festival dates, then, almost before we knew it, we were on a full-blown world tour that lasted several months and covered several continents. Since then it’s been more of the same.
The tour re-emphasized for me the very special connection that exists between the fans and the band when it comes to Joy Division and New Order. Everywhere I go I meet a whole range of people, young and old, who approach me with albums to sign and tell me how much our music means to them, how it’s been the soundtrack to their lives. Often they ask if they can have a photograph taken: they stand beside me holding out their iPhone to take the picture, and their hand is shaking because they feel so passionate about the music they’re struggling to hold the camera still. It’s an amazing feeling to think that I’ve been a part of something that’s had that kind of impact on somebody’s life, whether they’re from the suburbs of Manchester or the suburbs of Lima, Auckland, Tokyo, Berlin or Chicago.
New Order fans are fiercely loyal. They don’t just like New Order, they feel a profound connection between the band, the music and themselves. It goes way beyond simply liking a catchy tune, it’s something deeply personal: it’s not just a case of playing our music while they’re washing the pots or catching us occasionally on the radio – these are people whose lives have been changed, who’ve found some kind of solace or inspiration in what we’ve done.
The main factor in this is of course the music itself: people find so
mething in it that resonates with their own lives on a very profound level, and I’ve always found it humbling to hear people talking about what our music means to them.
That, however, has always been rather a one-way conversation. Until now.
I am by nature a very private person and have always preferred to let the music speak for me. Over the years, I’ve given countless interviews about the bands I’ve been in and the music I’ve made, but never before have I linked any of it to my personal life. My life in music has been shaped entirely by the person I am and the things that have happened to me. Our music has never been about, for example, being a virtuoso on a particular instrument, it’s entirely the product of our personalities and the sum of all our experiences.
Yet while the private aspects of my life have been vital to my creativity, I’ve always felt very uncomfortable talking about them. I constructed a barrier between the private and public sides of me at an early stage that I have rarely, if ever, opened.
Since we started touring again, however, I’ve seen the reactions of people to our shows and heard what our music means to them, and it’s made me think. I’ve realized that I owe people a look behind the scenes of my own story, because I don’t think anyone can have a true understanding of the music without an insight into where it came from. Life shapes you, and what life does to you shapes your art. It’s time for me to fill in the blanks: maybe then people might discern why the music we make affects them so deeply.
I feel that I’ve reached a point in my life where, if I don’t tell my story now, perhaps I never will. There are many things in the pages which follow that I’ve found difficult to talk about, things I haven’t spoken about in public before but which I think are vital to a comprehensive understanding of the person I am, the bands I’ve played with and the music I’ve helped to create. My silence regarding anything outside the bands and the music has allowed myths to permeate and untruths to become accepted as fact, so I hope that, along the way, I can correct a few misperceptions and lay to rest as many of those myths as possible.
For one thing, the truth is a far, far better story.
Chapter One
Streetlights
Los Angeles produced the Beach Boys. Dusseldorf produced Kraftwerk. New York produced Chic. Manchester produced Joy Division.
The Beach Boys’ harmonies were full of warmth and sunshine, Kraftwerk’s groundbreaking electronic pop was suffused with Germany’s post-war economic and technological resurgence while Chic’s music thrummed with the joyous hedonism of late seventies New York.
Joy Division sounded like Manchester: cold, sparse and, at times, bleak.
There’s a moment from my youth that I think illustrates perfectly where the music of Joy Division came from. It’s not even an incident as such, more a snapshot, a mental photograph that I’ve never forgotten.
I was about sixteen. It was a cold, depressing winter night and I was hanging around with some friends on a street in the Ordsall district of Salford doing nothing in particular, too old and restless to sit around at home, too young to go out drinking. I’m fairly sure Peter Hook was there, and so was another friend called Gresty, but the cold had killed the conversation. There was a thick fog draped over Salford that night, the kind of freezing, cloying fog whose chill penetrates right to the bone. Our breath came in clouds, our shoulders were hunched and our hands thrust deep in our pockets. But what I remember most is looking up the street and seeing how the orange sodium streetlights had all been given dirty halos by the fog. Making it feel like you had the flu. The lights would have been dingy enough at the best of times, but the fog, grimy with the dirt and grit of industry, had reduced them to a string of murky globules running the length of the street.
The silence was broken by the roar of an engine and a screech of tyres. A car came racing around the corner, the headlights dazzling us for a moment, and in it I could hear a girl screaming her head off. I couldn’t see her, I couldn’t see anyone in the car, there was just this raw, terrified screaming as it shot off up the road and disappeared into the fog. Silence descended again and I just thought to myself, There’s got to be more than this.
When there’s no stimulus to be found on the outside, you have no option but to look inside yourself for inspiration, and when I did it set off a creativity that had always been inside me. It mixed with my environment and life experiences to make something tangible, something that expressed me. For some people it’s channelled on to a canvas, for others it emerges on to the page, or maybe in sport. In my case, and those of the people with whom I created the sound of Joy Division, it emerged in music. The sound we made was the sound of that night – cold, bleak, industrial – and it came from within.
Manchester was cold and bleak on the day I was born, Wednesday 4 January 1956, in what is now the North Manchester General Hospital in Crumpsall. It was barely a decade after the end of the Second World War and the conflict still loomed large over the country, from the bomb sites that remained in every city and the legacy of post-war austerity – meat rationing had only ended eighteen months before I was born – to the all-too-vivid memories of the generations before mine. The spectre of war had not vanished entirely: the Suez Crisis was brewing and Cold War tensions were higher than ever following the formation of the Warsaw Pact the previous year.
It wasn’t all negative, though. There were signs that some things were changing. Even though I have to admit that I’m no big fan of the fifties, Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around The Clock’, one of the most influential records of the century, was top of the charts on the day I was born, and six days later Elvis would go into the RCA studios in Nashville to record ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.
I may have arrived on the cusp of an enormous cultural shift, but mine wasn’t the usual kind of birth. My mother, Laura Sumner, had cerebral palsy. She was born absolutely fine but after about three days she started having convulsions that left her with a condition that would confine her to a wheelchair her entire life. She would never walk, would always have great difficulty controlling her movements, and the condition would also affect her speech.
I never knew my father. He’d disappeared from the scene before I was born and I still have no idea who he is. Perhaps strangely, it’s never bothered me; I certainly don’t believe it’s really affected me. I think he’s dead now; I’ve just got that feeling. But even if he was alive I wouldn’t have any interest in meeting him. I don’t think you miss what you’ve never had.
Alfred Street was a small cobbled street of Victorian terraced houses not far from Strangeways Prison and close to the River Irwell. Lower Broughton was a typical Salfordian working-class area (the street that inspired Tony Warren to create Coronation Street wasn’t far away), governed by the needs of industry: Alfred Street and its neighbours provided the labour force for a range of local factories and mills and, within a few minutes’ walk, there was a potted version of the entire industrialized north-west: an iron works, copper works, cloth-finishing works, paint factory, chemical works, cotton mill, saw mill and brass foundry. The song ‘Dirty Old Town’, with its powerful evocation of love in a northern industrial landscape, was written about Lower Broughton. Living close to Strangeways Prison offered additional sobering insight into the underbelly of life: I remember as a boy once asking my grandfather who the line of men in the weird uniforms digging the road were and he told me they were prisoners on a chain gang detail.
Number eleven was my grandparents’ house and, when I was born, my mother was still living with them because she needed so much care. Our house was typical of both the area and the time in most respects: downstairs there was a kitchen, main living room, a parlour that was used for special occasions (although in our house my mother slept there, because she wasn’t able to get up the stairs), and an outdoor toilet. We didn’t have a bathroom. Upstairs, my bedroom was above the living room, my grandparents’ above the parlour. Also upstairs was a small storage room that really gave me the spooks as a child: my granddad had been an
air-raid warden during the war and it was packed with gas masks, sandbags, blackout curtains and all sorts of other wartime detritus. I don’t know if it was because I’d heard tales of the war and the terrible things that happened, but there was always something frightening about that room. I avoided it.
My grandfather John Sumner, a very knowledgeable and interesting man, was like a father to me. He was Salford born and raised and worked as an engineer at the Vickers factory in Trafford Park. He’d lost his own father when he was ten: my great-grandfather had gone off to the First World War with the Manchester Regiment and been killed at the second Battle of Passchendaele in 1917. My grandmother, Laura, was a very warm, very caring person who came from an old Salford family, the Platts. Her mother, like my mother, was also called Laura: it was a tradition in my family for girls to be named after their mothers, so my grandmother was ‘Little Laura’ and my great-grandmother was always known as ‘Big Laura’.
My granddad had a routine that he’d perform twice a day, once in the morning before leaving for work and once when he returned home in the evening. He’d come through the front door and walk straight through the house exclaiming, ‘Ah, fresh air! I need fresh air!’, go out into the backyard and take a succession of long, slow, deep breaths. The trouble was, at the end of our street, spewing out noxious fumes was the Wheathill Chemical Works. It was horrible; some days you’d even be told not to go out that day, as they were burning something there. I can almost conjure up the acrid smell today, yet my grandfather would happily breathe it in while extolling the health benefits of inhaling fresh air.
My great-grandmother, Big Laura, lived right opposite the chemical works. She’d had, I think, eight or nine daughters before having a son. Once he’d arrived, she felt she could call it a day. I remember going to visit her when I was very young and seeing my great-grandfather too, a lovely bloke who worked as a wheeltapper on the railways. I remember him being a very warm, kind person, but one day I was told he’d ‘gone on a long train journey’. I have very strong memories of him, so he clearly made a big impression on me, yet I recently discovered that I was only about two years old when he died.
Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me Page 1