Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  So, in view of the fact that Rob was incapacitated, we decided that the Sunkist ad was a good idea. I had been given the adapted lyric, in which the words went something like, ‘How does it feel, when a new day has begun? When you’re drinking in the sunshine, Sunkist is the one.’ Not the greatest lyrics of all time by any means and, in the studio, I just couldn’t sing it, I kept breaking up laughing, which would set everyone else off. Hooky was saying, ‘Come on, Bernard, you’ve only got to sing for a minute and we’ll be a hundred grand richer.’ Eventually, he got a piece of cardboard, wrote ‘£100,000’ on it in massive letters and plonked it on the mixing desk where I could see it, in order to focus my attention. I sang it eventually, Rob came out of hospital, found out what we’d done and went ballistic. ‘You stupid, fucking thick, fucking Salford bastards’ was, I think, the gist of it. ‘Selling out as soon as my back’s turned.’ The first thing he did was to put the kybosh on it, and the ad was never screened.

  Anyway, despite our apparent determination to achieve the opposite, ‘Blue Monday’ was doing very well indeed. Then one day Tony came into the studio and asked us if we wanted the good news or the bad news.

  We asked for the good news.

  ‘Well,’ he said, beaming, ‘“Blue Monday” is racing up the charts and we’re finding it hard to keep up with the demand, not just here but all round the world.’

  ‘Great!’ we said. ‘So what’s the bad news?’

  He started laughing in exactly the same way he had in America when all the gear had been stolen.

  ‘You know the holes in the record-sleeve design to make it look like a floppy disk?’ he chuckled. ‘Well, it’s costing us so much to stamp the holes in the cover that we’re actually losing money with every sale! Isn’t it wonderful?’

  Peter Saville had designed the sleeve to look like the Emulator’s floppy disk, complete with the hole, which looked fantastic, but in the light of this news suddenly didn’t seem like such a bright idea. I wouldn’t mind, but it was a circle of bloody air that was causing the loss! Our jaws hit the floor.

  ‘No, Tony,’ we said through tight lips. ‘It’s not even remotely fucking wonderful.’

  ‘Don’t worry, darlings,’ he said. ‘It’s fine. I’ve spoken to Peter Saville and we’re going to try and change it.’

  ‘But how many copies have we sold at a loss?’

  ‘Oh, I think it’s about a quarter of a million. Got to go, darlings. Bye!’

  Chapter Fourteen

  New York, London, Los Angeles, Knutsford

  During the 1980s, Factory’s man in New York was Michael Shamberg. We’d met Michael on our first trip and liked him immediately. Michael was – and is – a fascinating character, and produced many of New Order’s early videos (one of the first things he did with us was make a film of a gig we played at the Ukrainian National Home in New York in 1981). He had a great love for film as a medium, had his head firmly in the arthouse film scene and handpicked a host of fantastic up-and-coming directors to shoot our videos. He had quite an eye for talent, and the New Order videography is a pretty decent who’s who of great modern directors: Kathryn Bigelow, who directed Touched by the Hand of God and won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Picture with The Hurt Locker, for example, while Jonathan Demme, director of The Perfect Kiss, made The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia.

  Thanks in large part to Michael, ours were not your average pop videos of the time. They were little mise-en-scènes in themselves, with their own narratives and casts, rather than just a band miming to a song in an exotic location. In the short term, I think we probably suffered commercially a little because of that, but in that classic contradictory fashion of ours it also turned out to be a benefit. As with our determination to play live on Top of the Pops having a detrimental effect on our chart positions, the videos were not in the MTV mould and, much to our record company’s annoyance, didn’t really sell the records either. But, again, what they did sell was the band, because they made us stand apart from everyone else and showed that we cared about something beyond shifting units. That attitude, and the videos we made, gave us a different kind of integrity which meant we sold plenty in the long term. We didn’t plan it that way of course – we didn’t plan anything much – but it turned out unintentionally to be a very successful anti-strategy strategy.

  Michael also had his head in the New York music world. He was well aware of and immersed in the early electro, alternative and hip-hop scene and knew many of the people making waves in it. Our next step after ‘Blue Monday’ was to make a dance record in New York, and Michael’s recommendation for a producer was Arthur Baker. Arthur, who has over the years played his role in New Order’s development and success, is a big bear of a man: think Grizzly Adams, only grizzlier. With his short fuse and big heart, Arthur clicked very well with us and remains a good friend to this day. Arthur is from Boston, of Russian-Jewish descent I believe, but is very American, very New York: he talks tough, looks tough and doesn’t take any shit from anyone (well, except his wife).

  Arthur was the up-and-coming big-name producer in New York and had produced a string of dance hits, such as Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’ in 1982 (I loved how he took the synth line from Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans-Europe Express’ and adapted it into a groundbreaking electro track) and ‘Walking on Sunshine’, which he released under the name Rockers Revenge (not to be confused with the Katrina and the Waves track of the same name). Arthur worked closely with a musician called John Robie, a guy who would have slotted perfectly into The Wolf of Wall Street, if it had been about the music business instead of the world of finance. I was already familiar with John and his C-Bank project through friends in New York, and we’d collaborate on ‘Shellshock’ for the Pretty In Pink soundtrack. Arthur also worked with Fred Zarr, who played on a lot of the great early dance records (Madonna’s first album, among other things), so we were right in at the very heart of that New York scene.

  When we arrived to start work with Arthur he was already occupied making a track called ‘IOU’ by Freeez. Freeez was basically a pick-up band from the UK that was being moulded by Arthur and John for a record that would go on to be a massive hit around the world. The problem they were having when we showed up was that the key hadn’t been selected primarily with the vocalist in mind. They were struggling to find someone who could hit the high notes, and the recording was taking longer than expected. In the meantime, they parked us in Fred Zarr’s studio in Brooklyn, essentially the front room of a house, and told us to knock out some ideas. Which we couldn’t do.

  Arthur was used to working with the kind of experienced session musicians who could churn out stuff practically on demand, but we didn’t work like that, we weren’t sessioneers with a long track record of hits behind us. We didn’t know what the fuck we were doing and just froze. We had a much less feverish method of composition; in fact, there was no method: we’d just wait for inspiration to strike. We’d get together and talk about what we’d seen on television the previous night, films, books, girls or football until we got bored, then pick up our instruments and strum away until something happened. In New York, however, we’d landed in a place that had a completely different mind-set.

  At Fred Zarr’s, we ended up producing tapes of little more than us going through different sounds on the synthesizer until we found a cool one, at which point I’d think, Hmm, I wish we’d never found that, because it means I’ve now got to do something with it. We were struggling. Arthur had put us on the spot and we didn’t exactly rise to the occasion. To make matters worse, I’d come down with the flu.

  Eventually, Arthur finished with Freeez, which only left us with a couple of days in the studio. The person booked in after us was James Brown. So, no pressure there. It was a real urban studio, just off Times Square, right in the heart of one of the world’s fastest-paced cities, an operation with a rapid turnover that had a hint of the whole ‘time is money’ experience we’d had as Joy Division. It wasn’t as bad as that, t
hough, and Arthur was encouraging in his own way: his attitude was ‘either come up with something or fuck off’. We were pushed, but managed to put together a track called ‘Confusion’ on which everyone contributed to the lyrics, largely because we only had two or three hours to come up with them. I wouldn’t call them classic lyrics, but we did what we could in the time we had.

  Shortly afterwards, we set off on a tour of the US and Canada. For some reason, when we went to America in the early days, Terry always used to hire Lincoln town cars. The hire places would laugh at us, saying, ‘Nobody under sixty hires these.’

  Normally, Hooky or Terry would drive, because I’d always had just a motorcycle licence, but a week before we left for New York I’d passed my driving test. A good thing I had, too, as it turned out that neither Terry nor Hooky had brought their licences with them, whereas I was proudly carrying my brand-new one. The problem was that I’d never driven on my own before, so my first time in charge of a car was on the streets of New York in a vehicle the shape and dimensions of a mini aircraft carrier.

  I tried to look nonchalant when we picked it up, but it wasn’t long after I’d got behind the wheel that the hire guy twigged I wasn’t very good at driving. I drove down the ramp, aware that he was watching me, and when we reached the bottom I put my foot on the brake, and it was like someone had thrown an anchor out of the back window – the car stopped dead. Everyone in the back, the rest of the band and Rob, was thrown forward until they were practically pressed up against the windscreen in a tangle of limbs. I decided I’d better put my foot down before the guy who’d leased us the car came out and asked for it back.

  As we lurched forward again, Hooky was saying, ‘Fucking hell, Bernard, you can’t drive!’ I said that it wasn’t my driving, the brakes felt really weird. He assured me it was just that American cars had power brakes and I’d get used to them, but told me to pull over nonetheless. Which I did, behind a van from which two guys emerged – carrying a body bag. As omens went, this wasn’t a good one.

  Still anxious, but telling myself I’d get used to it, I pointed the car towards the eastern seaboard, and off we went, my knuckles white on the wheel and my face pale as I peered through the windscreen at the speeding lanes full of huge trucks and big American cars weaving in and out. Add to that the stress of worrying about hitting the brakes too hard and turning the rest of New Order into giant, swearing human torpedoes, it was with some relief that I pulled into our New York hotel at the end of it all. When we checked back in, there was a pile of urgent messages: someone, it seemed, had been frantically trying to get hold of me since we’d left, and I recognized the phone number as that of the car hire company. When I called and said who I was, the guy on the other end said, ‘Oh, my gahd! Mr Sumner! Are you OK?’ I assured him that yes, I was perfectly all right, but I was a bit alarmed at his concern for my well-being. He said, ‘Mr Sumner, I’m so sorry – we should never have given you that car. There’s a serious problem with the brakes!’ He asked me to bring it in straight away and he’d exchange it for another one, but by then we’d done hundreds of miles. Travelling a long way in a short time unaware of whether we could ever stop safely? It was like a parable of our musical lives.

  Anyway, at the end of the tour we played in Washington, from where we were to drive straight from the gig to a club called the Funhouse on West 26th Street in Manhattan in order to film the video for ‘Confusion’. The Funhouse was at the heart of the New York electro scene in 1983, a really wild place with a mainly Hispanic crowd, all shirts off and loads of tattoos. It had floor-to-ceiling lights shooting up, down and around the walls, and there were punchball machines dotted around the place with guys belting the living daylights out of them. The bouncers were enormous, like American cars stood on end, and it was a pretty mad electric scene. Whenever Arthur and John had put a new track together they’d take it to the Funhouse, where the DJ Jellybean Benitez would test its reception on the dance floor, so it was pretty cutting-edge and made the perfect location to shoot the video.

  We finished the gig in Washington, drove the 230-odd miles to New York and went straight to the Funhouse for the shoot, arriving at something like seven thirty in the morning. The crowd was still rocking, but we were very late. Jellybean was OK, but Arthur was very tense: his wife, Tina B, had been giving him grief and the atmosphere was a bit fraught. I think we were supposed to have arrived at something like three thirty, but for whatever reason we hadn’t got there until much later and, as we arrived, the Bakers were just finishing a big argument. Arthur’s wife stormed out of the club, got into his car, rammed the car in front, then the car behind, then the car in front again, and kept this up until they were out of the way and she could screech away into the dawn. Arthur told me later that when he got home she threw his synthesizer at him. They’re not together any more.

  Anyway, finally, we were able to shoot the video. The director was a guy called Charles Sturridge, who had just made the television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and come straight from shooting English country-house period aristocracy to this working-class Hispanic club full of tough guys and tough chicks dancing away to electro. A bit of a gear change, to say the least.

  The storyline of the video is a girl finishing work at a pizza place, going home, getting ready, meeting a friend and going to the Funhouse. At the same time, Arthur is finishing a track in the studio, taking it to the club and handing it to Jellybean to play. There are also a few shots of us driving through the streets of New York in a cab – all very Taxi Driver – and going into the club ourselves. It’s a clever video, with not just a single narrative but three, which at the same time really captured the atmosphere of the club, the scene and the kind of world in which Jellybean, Arthur and Robie were at the centre. We really bonded with Arthur. He came from quite a working-class background, just as we did, which probably helped us click. He had a real feel for beats – I’ve always felt Arthur would have made a great drummer if he hadn’t been a producer.

  There was one aspect of the New York process about which we stuck to our guns: we refused to let any session players play on our records. This meant that none of the brilliant people Arthur worked with – people like John Robie and Fred Zarr – played on the tracks; just us. Arthur had suggested using musicians from his stable – after all, it was the way he worked – but we said no. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it, but replied, ‘OK, fine, well, you guys go off and come up with the goods but make sure they’re goods with a New York sound.’ This was a sound which was probably made by five people in total, and to get it right was a little like having to crack a safe. As usual, we’d made things as difficult for ourselves as we could, but I think by doing that we retained a certain amount of integrity. We might not have had a stratospheric hit record like Freeez did with ‘IOU’ but, ultimately, we’re still around doing our own thing, so this crazy, intransigent attitude may have paid a dividend in the long run. Of course, who knows, if we’d let Arthur’s crowd loose in the studio – and, to be honest, if it had been solely down to me, we would have – we might have had an absolutely stratospheric hit and still enjoyed the longevity we’ve had. After all, what’s wrong with an extra pair of helping hands and additional input?

  The next big step after working with Arthur was signing to Quincy Jones’s Qwest label in 1985 so that it would look after our recorded output in North America. The first time I heard of Quincy’s interest was when we played a benefit for the striking miners at the Royal Festival Hall in 1984. It was a pretty good gig, not least because this time it didn’t involve any dodgy cinematic pornography. We were very anti-Margaret Thatcher and didn’t like what she was doing to industry, especially in the north, the northwest and in Scotland. I believe we lost 150,000 jobs in the north-west alone because of her policy of asset-stripping industry and replacing it with nothing, so when the opportunity came to play a benefit for the miners, we jumped at it.

  It was an occasion about as far from Quincy’s worl
d as you can imagine. Keith Allen was on the bill before us, doing a stand-up character he’d devised called ‘Northern Industrial Gay’. He’d go on wearing a leather jockstrap and a miner’s helmet and rub baby oil into himself. Terry must have got it into his head that, it being a miners’ benefit, the audience would all be miners. Somehow, he came to the conclusion that Keith must be a miner who’d got up out of the audience and was just messing about. On Terry goes and tries to push an oiled-up Keith from the stage, with Keith trying to explain that he’s the support act.

  It was quite an introduction for Quincy’s representative, who’d come to see us that night, but Tom Atencio was later to become our American manager. Terry used to call him Tom Percentago, but Tom is a lovely, lovely guy who’s always been great for us and slotted in perfectly right from the start. It turned out to be us rather than the miners who reaped the biggest benefit of all from that gig, as we decided to sign for Qwest and gained both a manager and a record company in one night.

  There were other offers on the table, we were flattered to hear, but Rob thought we’d receive more personal attention with Qwest, even though it was part of the Warner Brothers’ stable rather than an indie. At the time, I think the only other artist on Quincy’s label was Frank Sinatra. Ian would have liked that: he was a bit of a Frank fan.

  Quincy had become one of the most important musical figures in the world at this point, having produced Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and Thriller albums, which between them have sold something north of 130 million copies.

  He came over from LA to meet us. We took him to Knutsford. Over dinner there, we realized just what a really cool guy he is: to this day, I receive a Christmas card every year from Quincy and the day before I got married he rang me to wish me luck. His personal story is particularly interesting to me, too, because he also had a mother who had long-term difficulties with illness.