Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  A couple of reviews came out afterwards. One was good, apparently (I think Paul Morley was there and said he’d liked us, but he’d like us better in six months’ time, and he did), but I looked at the other review, which was really bad. It was totally dismissive and singled me out in particular as looking too young to be in a band and claiming I came across like a public schoolboy. I thought, Well, what’s wrong with looking young? And I clearly wasn’t a public schoolboy: reverse snobbery is one of my pet hates. I was learning early on that it’s best never to read reviews, good or bad. (These days, I can’t even look at photographs of myself, let alone read reviews or interviews.)

  By this time, we’d had to move on from the buffalo skins and the Grey Mare pub and found a new rehearsal space. A new landlord arrived who, strangely enough, decided he didn’t need a punk band making a racket in a room above his pub and threw us out. We tried an Irish pub, and the landlord told us we could rehearse there, but when we went in to set up he told us to fuck off. We also tried a church hall, and they too advised us we were better off looking elsewhere, because there was no room at the inn for a bunch of scruffy herberts toting noisy guitars. I think we then moved to another pub down the road from the Grey Mare. Back in the early days, we moved around to quite a few places. Recently, I found a review of the Grey Mare on the Internet. It said it was a dive, ‘but probably the best you’ll find on Eccles New Rd’. The guy wrote that the last time he’d passed it he had to ‘swerve to avoid two drunken old men stumbling out after a fight, dripping blood on to the tram lines’. Online reviews aren’t always right, but I think we’ll wait for the area to be a little bit ‘gentrified’ before New Order go looking to move back there for rehearsals.

  Anyhow, despite this peripatetic existence, we were learning all the time, and learning fast. In addition, we were finding out how serious we wanted to be about what we were doing and where we wanted to take it. There was no moment of catharsis as such, but we found ourselves being gradually seduced by what we were achieving to the point where it became the most important focus of our lives. We found that we loved coming up with ideas for songs, loved playing our instruments, even in such a naïve way, and loved the social aspect of it all: going to gigs and seeing other bands, watching, listening and learning. After all, when push came to shove, we were all just fans of music at heart: it filled the hole that living in Salford in the seventies had opened in us.

  What the Sex Pistols had done was show us that you didn’t have to be a virtuoso to write music and lyrics that could affect those who heard them, to create songs that mean something to people. Energy was one of the keys, not how dextrous the lead guitarist was or how many synths the keyboard player could have banked around him. We were underpinned by a ‘fuck you’ attitude to the sections of society we felt were stopping us: teachers, the police, older people telling us how we should be, what we should be doing with our lives. It’s an uncomfortable fact, however, that youth is always right: it’s the runner that picks up the baton that needs it, not the one who’s giving it away. At this point in British social and cultural history, being a misfit was for once not just an advantage but an opportunity, and there were very few opportunities for a regular working-class kid from Salford with next to no qualifications. And we were having a ball.

  Music had grown quickly to become a very important, if not the defining, factor in my life. It was a little as if I’d been born blind and then suddenly at the age of about sixteen had my sight restored and been utterly overwhelmed by all the light, colour, contrast and beauty I saw. There had been music in my house when I was growing up, but not much. What little there was was my grandparents’ taste. My gran used to sing sometimes. She used to love singing and once told me that in her younger days she’d thought about becoming a professional singer. But she sang old music hall numbers from the thirties that weren’t really what a small boy in the sixties wanted to hear. Sometimes the radio would be on and I’d hear music on that, but most of it, with a few exceptions, was rubbish to my ears: all balladeers and crooners on what I think was the BBC Light Programme. (We had a television when I was a little older but it could only receive one channel: ITV. I think my granddad could have got up a ladder and turned the aerial a few degrees so that we could have got the BBC, but for whatever reason he couldn’t be arsed. We could hear the sound of BBC television, but there was no picture. I remember that’s how I found out about the 1966 Aberfan disaster, where a whole school had been destroyed with the children in it: hearing the sound of the television news but seeing only ghostly distorted pictures and everyone in the house being very quiet at this terrible news.)

  From the unlikeliest of starts, then, music had become the driving force in my life. And now the band was finding its feet, learning what to do and – equally importantly – what not to do. We were going to see other bands as much as we could, going to punk clubs and hearing what they were playing and trying really hard to get more gigs. Finally, a couple of months or so after the Electric Circus gig, we settled on our perfect line-up: a huge step forward. Tony Tabac was a good drummer but, for whatever reason, he didn’t last and we replaced him with a guy called Steve Brotherdale, who played with another local band called Panik. Again, a decent drummer, but another guy who wasn’t quite right for us. For one thing, he used to bring his girlfriend along to all of the gigs, and we didn’t really like that; we thought the band should just be about the band. It was like bringing your girlfriend to work.

  Thankfully, we found Steve Morris, who’d answered an ad Ian had placed in the window of the Jones Music Store in Macclesfield – a shop which is still there, incidentally – and it was immediately obvious he was the right guy for us. He was a great drummer, for a start, and he just seemed to balance the rest of us perfectly.

  Steve is a hard character to define, but I’ll give it a go. He doesn’t like confrontation at all, to the extent that he’ll rarely give you a yes or no answer to a question. Instead of telling you what he thinks, he may, if you’re very lucky, tell you what he doesn’t think. He’s quite eccentric, almost in a John Cleese kind of way. He collects tanks, for example. Not models – real, full-size tanks. I believe he was quite wild when he was at school and he was quite wild in the band but, if he feels like it, I’ll leave him to say more about that in his own book. He’s a drummer, and drummers are odd people. They like hitting things for a living and Steve hits things very, very well.

  Brandon Flowers from The Killers said when he first met us, ‘I get everyone, but I just can’t read Steve. I don’t think he likes me.’ Not true, Brandon! Steve is just … well … Steve, and is actually very funny indeed. When we first met him, it was clear he was very chilled out and had that Macc thing going on, in common with Ian, a tangible Macc mentality that’s hard to define. I’m still not quite sure what it is even today, but whatever it was, they had it, and with Hooky and me coming from Salford it was a good combination. Steve was a great drummer, he lived near Ian in Macclesfield, he had his own kit, he had a car and he was a nice bloke. Perfect. He was – and still is – a bit odd, but odd in a really good way. Ian Curtis, Steve Morris, Peter Hook and me. The jigsaw was complete.

  This sounded the death knell for Terry as a member of the band, so we had to find something else for him to do. So we made him our manager, a move that produced results that can most politely be described as ‘mixed’. For example, at one point during that summer of 1977 we’d made some demos of material we’d written, and Ian asked Terry to make copies and send the tapes off to record companies. Days turned into weeks, and we’d had no response whatsoever. Ian was fuming, saying, ‘Those songs were all right, what’s going on?’ I took Terry to one side and asked him whether he’d actually sent off the tapes. He said he has, and pulled one out of his pocket. He put it on and the quality was atrocious from the start, all hissy and clicky. Then, all of a sudden, a few seconds in, the music was drowned out by the theme from Coronation Street. Not only that, next you heard Terry’s mum’s voice sayi
ng, ‘Terry, come and get your tea before it goes cold.’

  I looked at him. ‘Terry,’ I said levelly, ‘how did you make the copies?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I got two tape recorders and put them next to each other with a microphone so I could record one from the other. I thought it would save a bit of money on having proper copies made.’ And he’d sent all these tapes off to some of the biggest record companies in the country. He wasn’t exactly Brian Epstein.

  We were writing so many songs by this stage that the songs on the demo were probably not representative of our output even by the time Terry had got around to posting his iffy tapes. Joy Division songs were always a collaborative thing. I’d come up with the guitar and keyboard parts, Hooky would write his bass line and Steve would contribute his drum part. While Ian didn’t write music, he had a terrific ear: he was brilliant at spotting a great riff or a hook for a song, so he’d have that input as well. Normally, I’d arrange this rough collection of parts, saying, ‘That’s a good bit for the chorus’ or ‘We can put that bit in the verse.’ By then we’d have the basics of a crude but coherent track which we’d record on the world’s worst cassette recorder, using the world’s worst microphone, then Ian would take the tape away and write the lyrics.

  Ian was a wonderful writer; he loved words and had a natural gift for them. He loved writing and had a box file of stuff he’d written, a jumble of paper on which he’d jotted down ideas or phrases to return to later as well as properly polished, honed material. He usually wrote with a bottle of something close at hand. I remember he liked Carlsberg Special Brew, which was horrible stuff, like drinking fizzy cough medicine. He’d either pick out some words he’d already written that fitted the song or he’d write some new ones. It was a straightforward process for Ian, because he was in his element when writing. When I’m writing lyrics it takes a really concerted effort because I don’t find it easy. I have to force myself to sit down and find the right words and phrases and make them fit the music. Ian was basically a Mount Etna of words; they would erupt out of him. He would be writing anyway, even if he didn’t have a song to work on. If Ian hadn’t been in a band, he would have still been writing something, somewhere, somehow.

  Of course, we studiously ignored what he was writing about. It all sounded so bloody personal.

  You might have seen Ian playing guitar on a couple of tracks, most notably ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, but also ‘Heart and Soul’. Basically, we made him play the guitar because we wanted him to join in more, to make the process more inclusive, which meant he was playing under duress. His guitar was a Vox Phantom, a curious-looking, angular thing that had its own peculiar sound and lots of switches, the purpose of most of which was a complete mystery to him. He’d bought it because he thought it looked cool. Some of the control knobs even had misspellings on them. It looked mad, this guitar, which was the main reason Ian liked it. (I’d go on to use Ian’s guitar later, when we recorded ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ with New Order, because it had this particular thin sound I wanted that you wouldn’t find anywhere else.) His playing was pretty rudimentary (on ‘Heart and Soul’, it’s just a D minor chord all the way through) and he was a very reluctant guitarist. Fair play to him, he gave it a go, but obviously words were his gift and his strength.

  Ian read a hell of a lot – philosophy, and he really liked William Burroughs; Junkie was a favourite of his – but we’d never really sit around and talk about books. We’d never really talk about music either, any of us: we found the more we talked about it, the worse the music we wrote became. We’d sometimes come into rehearsals and play records on a record player, one or more of us raving about Iggy or Bowie’s new record, or maybe some older stuff, and possibly suggest that we wrote something like what we were hearing, but it would never turn out quite like what we were hearing. Generally, we avoided talking about music and bands, something which maybe contributed to our developing what was a unique sound.

  We’d never play other people’s songs either. When Rob Gretton came along as our manager, he effectively barred us from playing cover versions, but we were never really that way inclined anyway. Why take time learning someone else’s song when we could be spending that time writing a new one of our own? We once tried learning ‘7 And 7 Is’ by Love, but we got about eight bars into it and gave up. I think when it got to a difficult bit we just decided it was too hard, scratched our heads and went back to our own stuff.

  The way we wrote, with the three of us coming up with the music and Ian adding the lyrics, meant we could put a song together pretty fast: we found the process easy, it worked and it was quick. When Ian died, all that would change, it upset that natural balance, but the songs came thick and fast in those early days. We were pretty focused too – when we had a gig coming up, we’d try and write a new song for that gig and see how it went down. There’s no better barometer than audience reaction and it was a really good way of honing our set and identifying the songs that worked and the songs that didn’t.

  We wrote so many songs using that trusted formula that it’s hard to look back and separate them. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ emerged in that way and has proved to be one of the most enduring songs we’ve ever written, if not the most. It remains a key part of our live set and it’s won a slew of awards over the years: as recently as 2012, an Irish radio station presented us with a gong for ‘the greatest song of all time’, and Ian’s daughter, Natalie, travelled to Dublin with us to receive it. We wrote the song more than three decades ago, yet something about it continues to resonate with people, and generation after generation seems to discover it anew. I have to confess that we had absolutely no idea that it would take off the way it did; at the time it was just one song among the many we were writing, and it came together so effortlessly. I suppose subsequent events made it an incredibly poignant song, but its combination of the aggression of punk and a heartbreaking love song seems to give it something that is eternal.

  We’d always begin with the drums, then jam along until something happened and, like virtually all our songs, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ came about in exactly that way. It was a four-square effort: Hooky wrote the riff, Steve wrote the drums, Ian wrote the vocal and I wrote and arranged the other parts. I distinctly remember Ian spotting the riff while we were jamming, and it was his suggestion to keep it going all the way through the song. Then he took it away and came up with those extraordinary lyrics. The intro may have been unintentionally influenced by the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’ – that kind of droney, beaty power – while the riff sounds like a second cousin of an earlier song we’d written called ‘Novelty’.

  I think ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is one of the most beautiful love songs ever written. It’s not a love song for the sake of it, it’s no vacuous paean to pretend heartbreak or anything like that, it’s genuine, it’s real, it swings back and forth between full-blown power and reflective introspection, because that was exactly what was happening to the person writing the lyrics. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is a raw slice of real life that remains caught in time.

  We knew it was a good song, but our primary aim had been simply to come up with something that would fit well into the live set, a bit of a rabble rouser to turn the crowd into a churning mass of arms and legs. It is unquestionably a great song, though, with its contrasts, peaks, troughs, and it’s quite unusual in that it doesn’t conform to a regular structure: it’s got no middle eight, for example, but it’s a great song to play live, an absolute stormer.

  The gigs were picking up, even though it seemed that the only ones we could get were in the red-light districts of various cities across the Pennines, which meant driving along the M62 through blizzards and all sorts of weather. In fact, after a few months of that, Steve and Hooky got knocks on the door from the police, because it was the time of the Yorkshire Ripper and Hooky’s van and Steve’s car had been clocked on the motorway close to where some of the girls had gone missing. Neither of them was arrested or
anything; it never got any further than a few questions, as it was soon clear that they could account for their movements, but of course Ian and I found the whole thing extremely amusing.

  Ian had become our unofficial agent, in the sense that he was going out and getting us most of our early gigs. Most were great, but of course there’d be the odd dud, nights you’d spend travelling three hours each way to play to fifteen people in a pub in Huddersfield or somewhere, getting home at God knows what time and having to be up early for work the next day. One gig was in a place called Walkden and turned out to be some kind of talent night at a social club for old biddies. Basically, it was a procession of cheesy cabaret singers in dress shirts and massive bow ties … and then us. Following a load of fellas in purple velvet tuxes singing ‘My Way’ with Ian in his Jim Morrison leather trousers fronting this punk band, you can imagine the reaction. Every time Ian jumped in the air or did anything at all, the whole audience would scream, and I don’t think it was lust. We got in the car afterwards, and everyone was moaning at Ian and he was saying, ‘Fucking hell, I had no idea it was going to be like that.’ We drove straight to the Ranch Club, one of our regular Manchester hangouts, opened the boot, took the gear out and did an impromptu gig there and then. And it was a storming gig, maybe because we were all so pissed off. But even farcical gigs like Walkden were part of the learning process.