They were keen to show us all the other synthesizers too – PPG wave synths, really good new digital technology that was still in its infancy – but Rob just kept going back to the Emulator 1 and making the motorbike noise. In the end, he made us buy it for that reason, but it turned out to be a good investment: we used it on ‘Blue Monday’ for some of the strings, and you could record anything you wanted on it and play it back as a sample. It made life so much simpler. Its predecessor was the Mellotron, which did a similar thing but used banks of tapes which were pulled back on a spring: when you pressed a key on the keyboard it drew a piece of quarter-inch tape over a playback head. It was very crude but gave you this wonderful, fucked-up sound. However, if you took it on tour, you needed a whole team of technicians just to keep it in tune. The Emulator 1 was a much easier thing to handle.
While I was fascinated and excited by all this incredible technology, there was some initial resistance from rest of the band. I think Steve felt a bit threatened by drum machines at first, while Hooky didn’t show any interest in either the keyboards or that kind of music. Eventually, I think Steve came to find it as intriguing as he did threatening and, later on, he really embraced it, especially when it became clear we could use electronic drums as well as his live drum kit.
I did, I admit, get a little bit carried away at first. I’d been so seduced by the technology that I was even trying to persuade people to forget their real instruments and embrace electronic music completely, which was just wrong, and, obviously, the others weren’t keen to go down that particular road. The upshot was that New Order became a hybrid band: not purely electronic but making a mix of electronic and guitar-based tracks, which history has shown to be a successful combination.
Fairly soon, we began to have commercial success, especially in America, and it seemed we’d created the right sound at the right time. We started to write more electronic songs, ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’, for example. People seemed to latch on to it, and things really began to take off. America was a great barometer for this: where at first we’d be playing to four hundred people, we started pulling in fifteen hundred, then two thousand, and every time we’d go back the crowds would just go up and up, until we were playing to twenty or thirty thousand people. In 1986, we had three tracks, ‘Thieves Like Us’, ‘Elegia’ and ‘Shellshock’, in a film called Pretty In Pink, which had been written by the same man, John Hughes, who’d written The Breakfast Club, which also increased our market over there. We were getting a great deal of airplay on college radio, the gigs were well received and, with the audience effectively doubling every time we went back to America, we reached a stage where we were playing massive concerts.
I was now in a contradictory situation, a little bit like the one in which Ian had found himself; one where the dreams of success were coming true but I wasn’t sure if I was comfortable with it. In addition, I’d never dreamed of being a singer yet suddenly I was the frontman of a band playing to crowds of thirty thousand people. I hadn’t really expected this swift transformation from highly regarded cult band to international commercial success. I’d never wanted to be part of the mainstream, yet here we were becoming part of it, with the added pressure to deliver the goods being focused on me, the semi-reluctant frontman. I can’t even bloody sing yet, I’d think to myself. I’d had no vocal training and we’d never even had a producer who would tell me where I was going wrong. I started drinking far too much before gigs. Afterwards, I felt relieved I’d got through it and would drink even more. I felt I was in at the deep end. I didn’t really know what to make of this success. Obviously, it has its benefits, but I was conscious that there was much more responsibility arriving with it and, suddenly, it seemed a little too much like having a proper job. And I didn’t want a proper job, I’d become a musician in order to sidestep all that. But whoever said life should be easy? For most people, life is much, much more difficult than what I’ve just complained about. In time, I came to realize this and began to relish the challenge of becoming a proper singer. Also, I wanted to learn to write lyrics that weren’t nonsense, because they were nonsense at the beginning. It was a massive challenge, full of contradictions, but at times it was also extremely pleasurable.
We just kept on making music and experimenting, and in doing that we created one track in particular that would elevate our situation beyond all expectation.
Chapter Thirteen
Here comes success
‘Blue Monday’ was a key part of our ascension of the ladder regarding electronics and electronic music. I hadn’t found learning particularly interesting at school, but I found learning about how to make music, especially electronic music, captivating, because it was something you could teach yourself. ‘Blue Monday’ was the pinnacle of that learning process and would become the pinnacle of our commercial success too – it is the biggest-selling twelve-inch single of all time.
I’d felt there was no point in accumulating all this new equipment if we weren’t going to create something unique and interesting with it. How far could we take it? What were the boundaries of possibility? Could we push them out further? By drawing together all the things we’d learned about technology, the new sounds we’d heard in New York and the records and tapes I’d been given, we had the heady combination of factors that created ‘Blue Monday’.
One was the beat, which I’d first heard at a gig somewhere when a live sound mixer messed around with a delay unit and, either by accident or design, had for a few seconds added something extra to a drumbeat. Later I heard it on a Donna Summer record called ‘Our Love’, and wondered what else could be done with it.
We had a brand-new drum machine, one that had only just come out, an Oberheim DMX, and we linked to a little Powertran 1024 Composer sequencer I’d built. I asked Steve to programme the beat, and he added some fills and extra parts, while I thought about a bass line. I had ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ by Sylvester going round in my head, decided to attempt something inspired by it and came up with the simple bass line that underpins the track. Then Steve and I made some slight shifts in the rhythm from eighths to sixteenths to triplets, which made subtle changes to the groove. After that, we interspersed it with the kind of drum stops we’d been hearing in American dance music, the rhythmic punctuation picked up in the New York clubs, programmed it all and added a synth line over the top. When we started the sequencer, it fired up slightly out of time, which, although unintentional, sounded really nice and funky. Fucking hell, I thought, that’s great, how did that happen? We’ll have to do that in the studio and record it.
The next thing was that something went wrong with the drum program. We’d had this whole thing completed in one day by about four o’clock in the afternoon, and tried to back it up using a cassette machine, as you did in those days. However, instead of backing it up, it managed to wipe itself altogether and we had to start again, reprogramming the drums from scratch. Even today, I think about how bits of it were better on the original, kind of funkier. But does that matter now? Probably not. Then I added some strings, using the Emulator 1 and the Omni, Hooky came in and put some bass on, I took the whole thing away and wrote some lyrics, and that was it – that’s how ‘Blue Monday’ happened. It was only a day or two’s work, but the result of months if not years of accumulating the influences, knowledge and technology that made this brand-new kind of music possible.
As a side effect of creating this electronic-based track with very little in the way of live instrumentation, we also dug ourselves out of a bit of a hole of our own making. In the early days, we received a great deal of criticism for not playing encores at gigs. For one thing, Rob thought that encores, like cover versions, were corny, predictable and definitely not punk. (He thought the same thing about signing autographs, because he thought they set bands on a pedestal, saying, ‘You scumbags are no better than anyone else.’ We thought he might have a point, so in the early days we’d never give autographs, either.) That wasn’t the only reason, though. As
ide from gigs, we’d occasionally go along to multimedia nights at the Scala cinema in London, or sometimes at the Beach Club in Manchester, events where they’d put a band on followed by a film, a poet, another band and finally a DJ. We’d all really enjoy these nights and thought they were the way to go. We believed that after forty minutes or so of our music people wanted something else, so we’d play for about that long and then bugger off. It never crossed our minds that not everyone thought the same way: we thought we were doing people a favour. We wouldn’t leave the audience completely in the lurch: we wanted them to get their money’s worth, so we’d play our set and then put a DJ on, but this didn’t go down very well, especially abroad. New Zealand crowds in particular didn’t like it, while in Holland, once, the place erupted when we went off and Hooky ended up getting knocked out. For the rest of that tour the promoters had to put up signs at the venues saying something like ‘Please note the band only plays for forty minutes, they do not play “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and do not play encores.’
It took a full-scale riot in Boston in November 1981, just after we’d signed to Warner Brothers, to make us question the wisdom of our well-intentioned altruism when it came to encores. We played our usual thirty-five- to forty-minute set, came off and holed up in the dressing room with a few drinks. Suddenly, the door opened and in walked the police, telling us not to worry because they were there for our protection: it turned out there was a riot going on out in the auditorium because we’d played a short set and not come back for an encore. No one had told us this; it was only when the police arrived that we found out what was going on. We managed to escape with our lives, despite becoming caught up in a bit of rock-throwing outside the auditorium, which was a bit like being back in Salford.
The next morning I received a phone call from Mo Ostin, the president of Warner Brothers. ‘Hey, Bernie,’ he said, ‘what happened last night? I hear there was a riot. You can’t have the police turning up at gigs. And you only played for thirty-five minutes? Americans won’t like that.’
We had a band meeting as a result, and Rob was still insistent that we shouldn’t do encores. But it was all right for him: he wasn’t in the firing line, he didn’t have Mo ringing him up and people throwing things at him. Things had certainly shifted from the days when we were a small indie band. Where we got away with it then, now we were successful and playing to much bigger audiences. ‘Blue Monday’ seemed like it could be a handy compromise. We could finish the set, come off the stage, press a button and let the machines play the encore.
A few people initially didn’t like ‘Blue Monday’, they said it sounded nothing like New Order, and I guess we lost a few fans over it – a bit like when Bob Dylan went electric. But the record was being played in clubs, and the DJs loved it because it was a floor-filler. It spread across Europe, to the point where it would reappear periodically in the charts because people would go on holiday, hear it in the clubs and come back and buy it. The success of ‘Blue Monday’ was a real word-of-mouth phenomenon. It didn’t receive much radio play, because it wasn’t very ‘daytime radio’, and at seven minutes plus it was long and complicated for a single. Its success became so widespread, though, it meant that, in the end, radio stations had to play it, but it hadn’t been designed for that; essentially, it was a machine to facilitate dancing. As a song, I wouldn’t say it’s my favourite New Order track, but as a prompt to make you dance it’s unsurpassed. Even today, more than three decades later, when ‘Blue Monday’ comes on in a club, people get straight up and on the floor. It still cuts it.
We produced the track at Britannia Row, making the most of the incredible speakers they had in there. They had every frequency – subsonics, ultra-subsonics: it sounded amazing, as if you were in a really good club. I’d go out to clubs and listen to the sound systems, standing near the speakers and listening to what made a record sound good. At the behest of our engineer, Michael Johnson, we hired in some specific equipment to achieve the sound, including a bloody great thing from Germany called called a Transdynamic. We went to whatever lengths we could to make the record sound as good as possible.
There were some technical barriers. ‘Blue Monday’ was on vinyl, for a start, which, because of the length of the track, would reduce the quality. We would have to set the equalizing levels of the track carefully to make it sound quite hard so that, by the time it had got on to vinyl and softened up a little, it would still sound tough but quite nice at the same time. We had to experiment and do test pressings, make adjustments. Test pressings were made on acetate, a very hard plastic that would start to disintegrate after you’d played it no more than three or four times. Even acetate didn’t give you a truly accurate picture of what the track would finally sound like on vinyl, though, because acetate had a harder sound. It took a lot of work to make ‘Blue Monday’ sound as good as it did, but it really paid off, because it went on to sell well over a million copies in the UK alone.
That’s amazing in any circumstances, but even more so when you consider that we didn’t really promote the record. We didn’t promote anything in those days – for one thing, we didn’t really know what it involved and, anyway, we couldn’t really be arsed. Come to think of it, I don’t think Factory ever asked us to promote anything: Rob’s attitude was that, if the music was good enough, it would speak for itself.
Back then, however, if your record was doing really well, the chances were you’d have to go on Top of the Pops. Naturally, when faced with this great opportunity to push ourselves into the nation’s living rooms and possibly open up a whole new audience, we did our best to shoot ourselves in our collective foot.
In the early days, whenever we were approached by Top of the Pops we told them we’d only agree to appear if we could play live. The BBC would say that wasn’t possible because it wasn’t a live-music programme, and Rob would just walk away.
‘Blue Monday’ did so well, however, that at the end of March 1983 Top of the Pops finally relented and allowed us to perform the track live. The potential pitfalls associated with this were numerous. Quite a lot of ‘Blue Monday’ was on a shaky sequencer that I’d built at home, and there was no guarantee it was going to work when we wheeled it out on Top of the Pops. In the end, it did hold up, but it was pretty nerve-wracking standing there trying to sing on live television in front of millions of people, half expecting the track to grind to a complete halt at any moment. It was all right for Rob to come up with the bloody philosophy, but it was us who had to play it out.
The other thing that was overlooked in our blind dedication to live performance was the gargantuan lengths we’d gone to in making ‘Blue Monday’ sound great on the record. To then appear on the nation’s leading music show and just stick a microphone in front of it – well, let’s just say it was never going to showcase the track in its best light. We were playing this hi-tech song, live, in a television studio where the directors and promoters hadn’t wanted us to play live in the first place, using engineers who had never worked on live performance before. It was almost guaranteed to sound awful. Everyone else on the show would sound great, and then there’d be us, standing there playing live and sounding a bit mediocre. I think every time we performed live on Top of the Pops the record dropped down the charts the following week.
I guess, in retrospect, the clever thing was that, through this refusal to mime, we were promoting the band itself, not the record. Our longevity possibly bears out this theory. On the other hand, the effect on the record wasn’t promotion, it was demotion. We’d succeeded in coming up with an apparently foolproof way of ensuring we sold fewer records. I kept pointing this out, but the rest of the band thought it was great. Every time I suggested we changed this utterly self-defeating policy, I’d be comprehensively outvoted. Other musicians would be slapping us on the back for sticking to our guns and playing live, while I’d stand there, eyebrows raised, pointing at the record sliding down the charts even as we spoke.
A few years later, Top of the Pops c
hanged the rules and started making bands perform live instead of having them mime. It didn’t last long, though: they probably came to the same conclusions I had and decided it was both too much hassle and maybe not what the programme was about. The policy they settled upon was for the singer to perform live while the rest of the band mimed to a backing track. As you can imagine, I was a bit pissed off about this, given it was the others who wanted to play live, while I would have been happy miming. I only had to do it a couple of times, but it was pretty annoying. The band found it most amusing, of course.
There was one other occasion around this time when I had to sing ‘Blue Monday’ in strange circumstances, when we had our biggest direct flirtation with the commercialization of our music. The track was going to be used as the background to an advert for the fruit drink Sunkist as part of a big UK promotion. They didn’t just want to licence the song, however, they wanted me to record a special vocal for it, for which they were offering £100,000. Rob was in hospital after a breakdown at this point, and we knew he wouldn’t want us to do it. He had real principles about this kind of thing and wanted the music to speak for itself. He wouldn’t even sell T-shirts at gigs; he’d let other people do it. There was a guy we knew as Scottish Tommy who flogged T-shirts outside our gigs, and he felt so guilty about how much money he was making that one night he came into the dressing room waving a cheque for us, saying he felt bad about how well he was doing and wanted to give us something back. Rob came running over, saying that we didn’t want it.
Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me Page 16