Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  I made a good friend when I was there called Frank Callari, a DJ who would go on to manage acts like Ryan Adams and Marilyn Manson but who has now unfortunately passed away. He was a big, warm-hearted guy and toured with us on one occasion. He’d send me cassettes of the New York radio stations, which blew away the English radio of the time. For a start, there were no dance music stations in England back then, and he would send me over tapes of the American ones, and they were just amazing, a real musical education. Also, I had a good friend in Berlin called Mark Reeder, who has a trance and electronica label called MFS, which stands for ‘Masterminded For Success’. Back then, Mark was also Factory Records’ man in Germany – he was from Manchester but had moved to Berlin in the late seventies – and he would send me twelve-inch dance records from all over Europe. Mark’s still a good friend, and his is a fascinating story: he produced the last album on the old East German state record label Amiga before the Wall came down, and started MFS in late 1990 – the initials were also those of the old Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the East German secret police better known as the Stasi, which was quite a punk thing to do when you think about it.

  I’d listen to Frank’s tapes and Mark’s records, which, coupled with the clubs in New York, would all become big influences on me. I didn’t realize this until much later, of course: as far as I was concerned, I was just having a good time, but it clearly made an impression. We all thought New York sounded like the future whereas Manchester at that time sounded like the past. Manchester had a straitjacket on, but music in New York was loose and free. London was also developing a more vibrant club culture and, a bit like Ruth Polsky in New York, an early and current comrade of the band Kevin Millins took us around a lot of clubs there: Heaven, Taboo, The Black Hole and other establishments and dives in Soho and beyond. Kevin had also promoted early Joy Division gigs and became a long-term friend and corruptive mentor.

  It was an amazing time. All that needed to happen now was for those influences to start seeping into the music we were making after the demise of Joy Division.

  Chapter Twelve

  Resurrection

  We knew that if we were to dissociate ourselves successfully from Joy Division, a new monicker was essential. Choosing a name for any band is a difficult thing to do: on one hand, it’s just a handle with which to pick up an identity; on the other, it will stick with you for a long time – in our case, thirty years and counting – so you have to get it right. We were really struggling to come up with something effective that we all liked until, one day, Rob was reading an article in the Guardian that detailed how, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, a new order had been established in Cambodia. He looked up from the paper and said, ‘Lads, how about New Order?’

  We turned it over in our minds. It wasn’t bad.

  ‘One thing’s for sure,’ he went on. ‘We don’t want another name with any Fascist connotations after all the hassle we had with Joy Division. New Order. It’s completely neutral.’

  Ahem.

  In all innocence, we honestly didn’t know there was a connection between Hitler and the phrase ‘new order’, so we pursed our lips, nodded and agreed. It had a similar vibe to ‘Joy Division’ and it was certainly appropriate. So we went for it.

  Of course, no sooner had we announced it than everyone was saying, ‘Here we go, they’re at it again, they’re a bunch of bloody Fascists! Why don’t they just call themselves Third Reich and be done with it?’ (There was even a strip in Viz a few years ago where one of the characters was presenting a Top of the Pops-style show and introduced, playing their new single, ‘Blue Sunday’, a band called Third Reich …) We’d landed ourselves in it again: yet another layer of disaster to add to the litany of disasters. We decided to stick with it, though: we knew we weren’t Fascists, and at the time we were doing gigs for Rock Against Racism, but no one wrote a single word about that. Fuck everyone, we thought, fuck the world, we’re going to do what we want to do and just get on with it, New Order we were, New Order we’d stay. There was just one more piece missing. When it was decided I was going to be the singer, I felt I couldn’t sing and play guitar at the same time. Well, actually, I couldn’t sing full stop and had really only just learnt the guitar, so to try and combine the two was just too much to take on. There’d been an incident at a Joy Division gig at Eric’s in Liverpool once, where we’d been fooling around in the dressing room, things had got a little out of hand and Rob had lunged at me with a bottle. The bottle had smashed and put a deep gash in my finger – about a minute before the gig. We went on stage and there was blood all over my guitar and my shirt, and it was clear I needed to get a plaster on it at the very least. Steve’s girlfriend, Gillian, who he’d met when her band, The Inadequates, were rehearsing near ours, happened to be at the gig that night, and I hissed into the wings, ‘Gillian can play guitar, can’t she? Just get her up for one song while I get patched up.’ So that’s what happened: Gillian climbed up on stage, filled in on guitar for one song and then I came back on after some running repairs to my finger.

  When it became apparent that I was having problems singing and playing simultaneously, we had a meeting, decided we should get someone else in and remembered the incident at Eric’s. Gillian’s name was suggested – who by, I can’t remember, possibly Rob – and because she’d got up that night and coped pretty well, it seemed a good solution. It was certainly much easier than the rigmarole involved in finding someone completely new. Also, her personality fitted in with the rest of us, and that was important. We asked her if she was interested, she was, and that was that, Gillian Gilbert joined New Order on keyboards and guitar, which meant I was free to concentrate on singing.

  Gillian found it a bit difficult at the start, but she got better and better. The style of guitar I’d been writing was quite aggressive, and Gillian’s not really like that; it was like giving a male vocal part to a girl to sing. It was hard for her to have to step into both my headspace and my shoes and interpret what I’d written. It would have been a steep learning curve for anyone. Then she had to learn to play keyboards as well, all in front of three blokes, three blokey blokes who were, you know, blokes …

  So, we had the line-up and we had the name. Now we had to take the music forward. The New York influence was crucial, of course, but back in the UK there were a few places in London playing some great stuff too and we were being exposed to new types of music at just the right time, just when we needed it. In the few short years of Joy Division we’d made some dark and extreme music which I think took that sound as far as it could go, and we knew we couldn’t just continue doing that for ever. In that respect, it was similar to punk, where every song would be a frantic three-, maybe four-chord thrash. It was absolutely great, you’d go and see these bands and there’d be this fantastic energy on the stage and in the audience, but within a few years it had hit a brick wall, had said what it needed to say and had nowhere else to go. It morphed into something else. The success of Joy Division had suggested we’d done something unique, something new, but, like punk, there was only so far we could take that ethos and that sound. For one thing, our music had become so incredibly dark and cold, we couldn’t really get any darker or colder. And, obviously, Ian was no more.

  We reached a crucial turning point at a critical time: being present for this extraordinary zeitgeist in New York and being exposed to fresh influences from Europe and the US via people like Mark Reeder, Frank Callari and Ruth Polsky. I remember quite clearly sitting in a club in New York one night, around three or four o’clock in the morning, and thinking how great it would be if we made music, electronic music, that could be played in one of these clubs.

  I’d become interested in electronic music back in the Joy Division days. As a band, we loved Kraftwerk, the inventiveness they had, and we’d play ‘Trans-Europe Express’ through the PA before we went on stage. But we were also into disco records by people like Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder, anything that had a new sound and felt like i
t was looking forward. We still loved guitars, too, though: the Velvets, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Neil Young and Iggy Pop. The first time I went round to meet Ian at his house after we gave him the singer’s job, he said, ‘Fucking listen to this,’ put a record on, and the song was ‘China Girl’ by Iggy Pop from The Idiot. He said it had just come out that day. I was blown away; I’d not heard any of Iggy’s music before and I thought it was fantastic. There was also the stuff that went back to my youth-club days: the Stones, Free, Fleetwood Mac, Santana, Led Zep, The Kinks.

  Then Bowie produced the trilogy of albums he made in Berlin, which was infused with a cold austerity, something we could relate to living in Manchester, a place with a very similar vibe. We also liked the B-sides of ‘Heroes’ and ‘Low’, pieces of electronic music he’d created along with Brian Eno. I loved it. It was a whole new kind of music to me, one that was moving things on, looking to the future, not the past.

  All these influences were converging at roughly the same time as the equipment was becoming available to put them into practice. I’d experimented with synthesizers in Joy Division, on occasion with Martin Hannett, and had a string synthesizer myself, an ARP Omni II, which I bought because I liked the look of it: I didn’t really care what it sounded like. As it happened, it was a string synthesizer, which was fortunate, because I wanted one and it was the only affordable synth on which you could play more than one note at a time. Most synths at the time were super-expensive, way out of my price range, but one day I saw a magazine called Electronics Today that had a picture of a synthesizer on the front and the legend, ‘Build this for £50’ written over the top of it. I bought the magazine and the kit and for three months stayed up really late putting together my Transcendent 2000. I’d put a film on the TV, usually 2001 or A Clockwork Orange, or a film from the 1940s. I loved the films of Powell and Pressburger; they were the sort of films where I could turn the sound off and have these great images playing into the night as I soldered away, music on in the background.

  I was also working a lot with Martin Usher, the scientist Martin Hannett had introduced me to when he came in to fix my guitar amp during the recording of Unknown Pleasures. Whenever I got stuck on something technical, I’d go and see him, and as well as giving me good advice he would tell me about all the latest developments in the silicon world of microchips. He wasn’t interested in electronic music himself – trams were his thing – but it was Martin who’d first told me about samplers. I remember clearly him telling me, ‘There’s a new thing coming out called a sampler, maybe we should build one,’ and I asked what it was. It turned out to be a development of the thing that I’d used in the making of Unknown Pleasures, that very crude, simple sampler. The technology had advanced by this stage but, generally, samplers weren’t available outside universities and laboratories. Martin also told me about these amazing things called floppy disks, a revolutionary step forward that meant you could store the sounds you were creating on the samplers and use them again. Previously, as soon as you turned the machine off you’d lose everything, the memory would be wiped, but these floppy disks, Martin told me, enabled you to save the sounds you’d made and use them again. It was the future, he said, and talked me through how first of all there’d be 8-bit samplers, which would sound like long wave radio, then they’d bring in 12-bit samplers, which would sound like medium wave, and then 18- or 24-bit samplers, which would sound like FM radio. On top of everything else, Martin was getting me all fired up about the kind of technology that was coming over the horizon. (Martin never took any payment for all the help he gave me, incidentally, but we helped him out in other ways. He had an odd situation in the basement of his home in that he had a Hells Angel living down there with his motorbike. This guy was very, very keen on LSD and Martin only asked that we made a charitable contribution to his purchases.)

  Despite all these developments, the first electronic dance track we recorded as New Order came about by a fortunate accident. In the summer of 1981 we went into the Marcus Music studio in London, where Steve found an Oberheim synth in the corner and tried plugging a drum machine into it. As luck would have it, the drum machine triggered the Oberheim into a rhythm that was perfectly in time with the drums and it sounded great – like Giorgio Moroder, but at a fraction of what hiring him would have cost! This seems like nothing now, but there weren’t many synths that could do that in those days: usually they were played by hand like a traditional instrument, or with a crude but expensive sequencer. With this little Oberheim, however, you took the pitch from the keyboard and the rhythm from the drum machine.

  We went to Martin and showed him, and the first thing he did was get Steve behind his kit to lay down a beat and record live drums. I asked how we were going to trigger the synthesizer from the drums and he told me that the VU meters on the tape machine had a test output which produced a voltage. We took a cable out of the hi-hat track, plugged it into the synthesizer – and it worked. It would start to go out of time after about thirty-two bars, but we’d just start the machine again. Back then, we didn’t have a sequencer: music computers simply weren’t available and there was no MIDI, which is a code that synthesizers use to talk to each other. None of that stuff had been invented yet, so for us it was all about control voltages and gate voltages. It wasn’t perfect by any means – the keyboard would go out of pitch – but it just about worked, and that’s how we wrote ‘Everything’s Gone Green’, our very first tentative step into electronic dance music.

  One large piece of fallout from this, however, was that it marked the end of our relationship with Martin Hannett. When we put ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ together, we thought it was great – these big, powerful drums under this pounding jigga jigga jigga sound from the synthesizer. It sounded like the future and, best of all, it sounded aggressive, like someone kicking you in the face.

  When it came to the mix, however, Martin started making it all wispy and ethereal sounding again. I remember Hooky and I were in the control room, sitting on this big long bench seat at the back. Martin didn’t want us there, so what he did was tell us the engineer had diabetes and the temperature had to be kept cold in order to keep him awake, turn the air-conditioning down and try to freeze us out of the studio. He knew the vents were right above where we were sitting. We stuck it out as best we could, and I’d whisper to Hooky, ‘The drum machine needs to go up, you tell him,’ and Hooky would. Martin’d tut, give him a dirty look and do nothing, so after about ten minutes I’d try it, and we’d bat it between us, harassing him into keeping the sound aggressive.

  In the end he got sick of this, stood up, said, ‘Right, you do it, then,’ and went to bed. So in the end we mixed it ourselves. Chris Nagel, the engineer, was saying, ‘What are you doing? You haven’t got a clue!’ He was right, we didn’t have a clue, but if you don’t have a go at things, how are you ever going to have a clue? We were musicians, we’d written the bloody song and we knew what it was meant to sound like. So we mixed ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ and at the same time realized we’d finally had enough of this wrestling with Martin.

  There was always a contradiction with Martin: he was a catalyst and very inspiring in the studio, but when he was mixing a record, I didn’t feel he was capturing the true sound of the band. Occasionally, he was spot on, and one of Martin’s mixes that I did like was Joy Division’s ‘Atmosphere’. There’s actually some controversy over who recorded and mixed it: we recorded it at Cargo in Rochdale, which was run by a guy called John Brierly, who had given us free or cheap studio time under the assumption that he’d be producing us. We turned up, Rob turned up, then Tony and Martin turned up. There was a big confab over the apparent mix-up and, while they were all arguing in the control room, we wrote ‘Atmosphere’, right there, that day, on the spot. I think the compromise was that John engineered while Martin produced, but ‘Atmosphere’ wasn’t changed a great deal in the production. Martin put that shimmering, tinkling sound on the chorus, which sounds fantastic, but essentially it was
very well engineered and geared more towards the sound we wanted, recorded on a 2-inch-valve 16-track tape recorder that gave it a really fat sound (although I’ve heard recent versions of it and, these days, I think it desperately needs remastering).

  By that time, people had been making experimental electronic music for many years, usually in universities and laboratories, where they’d cut up audio tapes, speed them up, slow them down and put them together in disjointed pieces to create very abstract avant-garde music. These were real pioneers, and the legacy of their work was in the samplers and synthesizers that began to come on to the market in the early eighties. Among other things, they enabled you to take sounds out of the studio and on to the road to play live. I found the sheer range of possibilities offered by a synthesizer and by sound manipulation deeply intriguing, and it was that intrigue that gave birth to the ideas and music we made in New Order.

  The Emulator 1 was an early sampler on which you could take pieces of music and bend and shape them. The manufacturers were so exclusive at the start that you had to make an appointment at a shop in London just to try them out, so we all trooped south to have a look at one. To help show what the Emulator 1 could do, they’d sampled the throb of a Harley Davidson engine, something Rob was particularly impressed by. He’d press the key and, instead of a conventional piano sound, a Harley engine came out of the speakers. The look on his face was one of sheer disbelief, as if this was some form of witchcraft. He was looking at it, saying, ‘How the hell is that happening?’