Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  Ulp. What he didn’t know was that I’d been taking Valium all through the tour to help me sleep and had developed a significant tolerance to it. I said, ‘Listen, Doctor, the Valium’s had no effect whatsoever and I promise you I could get up off this trolley right now and run round the ward. Seriously, it’s not working.’ Despite my increasingly urgent pleading he just smiled sympathetically, patted my arm and assured me I really had nothing to worry about.

  They put this thing down my throat, and it was absolutely disgusting, but what they found was worse. There was a network of burns, cuts and abrasions all over my stomach lining. It wasn’t an ulcer but it was something very like it. The reason I was coughing was that stomach acid had been released by the abrasions, the vapours were drifting up to my throat and I was basically breathing the noxious fumes.

  There was little doubt as to what had caused it: after years of relentless hard living my lifestyle was starting to catch up with me. In mitigation, I did try to put forward the incredibly spicy meal I’d eaten in Minneapolis a couple of days earlier – it really had been like swallowing lava – but I’d been burning the candle at both ends for so long the flame had finally reached the middle. I had to change something before I did myself some real damage.

  Lying there with little else to do but stare at the ceiling while nearly everyone else – the band, the crew, Public Image Ltd and The Sugarcubes, who were with us on that tour – were in Detroit having a ball at the party, I had plenty of time to reflect upon and think about the implications of my situation. I was making myself ill for the sake of a money pit with a massive hole in it. I needed a break, or I was in serious danger of becoming an alcoholic, an addict of some kind or even dying.

  I was hungry, weak, sore and three hundred miles from the party. The doctor had a good long talk with me, and I heard my own voice in my head say, ‘Fucking hell, Bernard. What are you doing?’

  I had expressed, strenuously, my concerns to Rob before all this had happened, about how I believed we needed to scale back a bit and chill things off, take stock and think about the best way to take New Order forward. They had fallen on deaf ears. I guess Rob was worrying about the money: we had to tour to keep the cash coming in to prop up the Haçienda – but my health was at stake now. It was a stupid situation; an unsustainable one. I was going to have to take matters into my own hands. The emphasis in New Order had shifted into a seemingly endless round of gigging and touring. Hooky, in particular, loved it, much more than being in the studio, but I needed a break.

  Also, I sensed that I was on the receiving end of a bit of resentment from the rest of the band either for pushing the group in an electronic direction or giving the impression somehow that I was effectively seizing the controls. To them, I say I’m sorry if I came across as a twat back then, but I was only a twat because I was feeling so much pressure. Also I was pretty angry about this financial bucket with the dirty great hole in it. We were doing our bit by releasing hit records and having successful tours that made money, but the home guard seemed to have got into a situation from which they couldn’t extricate themselves. I wrote the lyrics to the song ‘Run’ about it. In retrospect, those lyrics were about how I felt back then: ‘Work your way to the top of the world, then you break your life in two. You don’t get a tan like this for nothing, so here’s what you’ve got to do.’

  At the same time, Johnny Marr was just emerging from the fallout from the break up of The Smiths. He was pretty burnt out too, but for different reasons: in The Smiths, they’d written a huge amount of material in a very short time, and the break-up itself had been pretty acrimonious. I’d met Johnny when he’d played guitar on a session I was producing for Mike Pickering’s band a few years earlier, and we’d kept in touch. Our respective situations had left us feeling a little like kindred spirits, and it wasn’t long before we started writing music together as Electronic.

  Electronic was very much a pressure-release valve for the two of us, because we’d both found ourselves in fraught situations. Johnny’s predicament was different from mine in that The Smiths had actually split up, whereas I just needed to get a bit of distance between New Order and myself in order to revive my creative energy and come back stronger to fight another day. Also, it felt a little like the Haçienda had become a god that we all had to worship and no one was actually listening to our concerns about it. We were in a situation where the tail was effectively wagging the dog, and something needed to be done but no one seemed able to take the first step. Add that to the self-inflicted repercussions of too much partying, and something had to give. To all intents and purposes, I went on strike from New Order. Not in the brazier and donkey jacket sense, nothing that militant; I just thought I needed to demonstrate my concerns at the way things were going. It turned out that, once we’d played the Reading Festival in August 1989, we wouldn’t play live again as New Order for four years.

  A subtle harmonic sounding through all of this was that New Order never let other people into our closed inner circle of musicians. While this has allowed us to preserve a very distinctive sound, it’s also left us open to the danger of repeating ourselves and doing the same old thing year after year.

  Obviously, the longer you work with a band, the more baggage you collect through being cooped up together on buses, aeroplanes and in sweaty dressing rooms while touring, and working intensely together in studios when recording, often staying on the premises full time. With that level of intensity, it’s inevitable that you’ll build up little niggles with each other, little things you dislike. If you travel on a bus or a train now, there’ll usually be a kid playing tinny music through his mobile phone, or some businessman on his iPhone sitting next to you, talking to Nigel in Accounts and shouting about his boring-arse business until you feel like punching him in the face. In a band, that feeling is multiplied and intensified 24/7. You go to an airport in some country or other, it’s only an hour and a half after you’ve gone to bed, you’re hungover and there’s someone next to you picking their nose and playing a tape of a band you hate. With the best will in the world, eventually, that’s going to get on your nerves. Even if you’re lucky enough to be in a band where there are no significant egos, the tension inevitably builds up until the whole thing reaches breaking point.

  There are, I think, two solutions. One was suggested to me by Billy Corgan from The Smashing Pumpkins: don’t travel together as a band. At first I thought that was ridiculous – you’re all supposed to be together and on the same team – but the more I think about it, the more it could make sense: if you’re going to get on each other’s nerves, just get together for the gigs and be pleased to see each other when you arrive.

  The other solution is to go your separate ways for a while and get a breath of fresh air. That’s what we did with New Order in 1989 and, to a much greater extent, between 1993 and 1998. I don’t think three or four blokes and one woman who aren’t related are designed to spend so much time together. It’s just not natural.

  I felt a need to refresh myself as a musician and learn from other players, see how they wrote songs, observe the things they did differently and the things they did the same. Our ‘keep it in the family’ musical policy meant that I wasn’t going to find that with New Order. We’d not had any musical education beyond the ‘teach yourself’ books we’d bought as teenagers, and even that comprised only about 10 per cent of our musical know-how. The other 90 per cent came from our record collections, our life histories and our environment. We were also learning by playing live, but to play live effectively the hard work has to be done in the rehearsal room. To this day, I hate rehearsing. Phil and Tom love it and Steve really likes it. I don’t know for sure how Gillian feels about it. It’s mechanical: rehearsals are just about reactivating those brain cells that control your left and right hands and, though I know it has to be done, I find it boring, like doing push-ups. What I like most of all is the writing, the invention, and in the late eighties that creative spark needed reigniting. In Johnny
, I found the perfect partner at the right time to achieve just that.

  Interestingly, Johnny came from a very different angle musically. He’d written some brilliant stuff – and still does – but while I was going out clubbing in New York and Manchester, he was sitting at home practising his guitar. He found that the more he rehearsed, the luckier he became. This was a different way of arriving at success – the traditional way – and he became a very skilled musician as a result. In New Order, we did it the unorthodox way, more through instinct and inspiration. This isn’t to say Johnny’s playing wasn’t inspired, far from it, but his was a combination of skill and inspiration. With us, the inspiration came first and the skill would come later.

  I began working with Johnny on the first, eponymously titled Electronic album during 1988, and it was great: I could play as many synthesizers as I wanted without sensing bad vibes. Indeed, Johnny was actively encouraging me on that score, because he wanted to learn all about synthesizers as they’d been verboten in Die Schmidts. Yet while I was delighted that, certainly on that first album, Johnny was keen to learn about electronics, I was still keen for him to carry on playing brilliant guitar. I remember saying to him in the studio one day, ‘Johnny, if you don’t play any fucking guitar on this record, then everyone’s going to blame me.’

  ‘Yeah, OK, Bernard,’ he replied, ‘but what does this button do?’

  Johnny is a forward-looking, open-minded musician, and he wanted to try pastures new. To a certain extent, even as one of the best guitarists this country has ever produced, he saw the world of electronic music as the future. This was literally music to my ears, but of course you can’t deny – and I never would – that great music has always been made with guitars too. Although I love electronic and dance music, I also love guitar music; that’s where my roots lay and it provided my early influences. If you look at some of the interviews I gave around this time, you’ll never find me hectoring that electronic music was the only way forward. I was constantly reiterating that a good song is a good song no matter what instrument it’s written on. It could be a guitar, it could be a synthesizer – it could be a fucking noseflute, for all I care.

  Johnny and I went into the studio and just dug in. Strange as it might sound, it was probably a good four to six months before we felt truly comfortable in each other’s presence: we were probably both a little bit in awe of each other at first. Once we’d broken through that barrier, however, the work started becoming fun. We had a call from Neil Tennant to say he’d heard about what we were doing and would love to be involved, so we invited him up. It so happened that around that time we’d written the backing track for ‘Getting Away with It’. Neil travelled up to Johnny’s home studio, we finished the track, Neil recorded the vocal and it became Electronic’s first single.

  I was learning a great deal. We brought in an arranger called Anne Dudley to work on the strings and I found it a fantastic experience. It was deeply interesting working with classically trained musicians and seeing the different ways in which they approached things. There was a whole range of different methodologies in play: Anne rang me one day and asked me a list of questions, whether I was an active or passive person, an introvert or an extrovert, that kind of thing (I said I was ‘probably an introverted extrovert’). From my answers, she tailored the strings to suit my personality. Amazing stuff.

  That’s not to say, however, that I didn’t occasionally get into the same old mess with Johnny that I used to get into in New Order. Take Electronic’s first promotional tour of the States, for example. In the US, Electronic were on Warner Brothers, and they brought us over for a round of publicity and interviews, beginning in New York. On arrival, we had a night off before the promotion treadmill creaked into action, so Johnny and I promptly went out on the town. It so happened there was a full-moon party taking place that night in the shadow of the World Trade Center with 3D from Massive Attack deejaying. It was an open-air rave in the heart of Manhattan beneath the Twin Towers: there was a clear sky, the full moon and we had a great time. Too great, as it turned out, because after it finished it wasn’t enough and I found I’d slipped all too easily into the comfortable old suit of the New Order tours. We ended up at a small club that played soul music, but I wasn’t really in the mood for soul, it was house music I was after. So when we left the club, which must have been at about three in the morning, I still wasn’t finished, even though we had a whole range of interviews starting a few hours later. We’d not been in America for twenty-four hours and already I’d dragged Johnny under my corrupting wing. I don’t think that level of partying is really part of Johnny’s nature. He certainly liked a good time – he was neither saint nor angel on that score – but he wasn’t as dance-club focused as I was. But hey, he was finding the world of electronic music and instruments fascinating and wanted to know more about it, so, in effect, this night was an educational expedition. A field trip, if you like. If only I could find him some house music somewhere …

  When we came out of the soul club, there was a pickup truck parked outside with a group people in the back who I’d decided looked like they knew what was going on. I called out to them and asked if there was a party going on anywhere. A voice replied that there was and we should jump in the back of the truck. So we hopped in, the truck pulled away, and before I knew it this guy in front of me had turned round and said in broad Brummie, ‘Fookin’ ’ell, it’s Bernard Soomner, what the fook are yow doing here?’ I said we’d just arrived and were looking for a party. When I asked where we were going he said there was a house party in Harlem. So off we went.

  Then someone else turned round and said, ‘Fucking hell, New Order!’ It turned out to be Seal. He asked what I was doing there.

  ‘Someone told us to get to get in this truck,’ I said, ‘so we did.’

  I looked at him and could tell he was thinking, ‘Why on earth would you do that, you fucking madman?’

  We arrived at the party to find it was a nice kind of chill-out thing, not quite what I was expecting but, nevertheless, a great way to wind down and finish the night. We went back to our hotel in uptown Manhattan, walking through Central Park as the dark blue of the early dawn was seen off by the sunrise. We passed people going to work as New York woke up, dusted itself down and got on with a new day. Our day was just ending, however, at eight in the morning, and when we stumbled into the foyer of the hotel we found Marcus Russell, Electronic’s manager at the time, regarding us with the kind of withering look teachers reserve for disruptive pupils. Johnny and I looked at each other and, in the unforgiving glare of the cold light of day, clearly shared the same thought: what have we done? The interviews started at ten, barely two hours later, so we went to bed for an hour, got up again and, dear reader, this is I’m afraid where the narrative turns into another story involving vomit. We were in a limo doing the circuit of the New York radio stations and, as the day progressed, we felt, to put it mildly, increasingly unwell. We had a very big, bright green bag with us and, before long, were both using it to throw up into. As my hangover grew progressively worse and the limo pulled up at yet another station, I had to admit defeat.

  ‘Fucking hell, Johnny,’ I croaked. ‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t move, I’m done.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Bernard,’ he replied. ‘I’ll handle this one on my own. You just stay here.’

  He disappeared into the building, and the driver said, ‘You guys are on the radio, right? I’ll put it on.’ Much against my will, he tuned the limo radio to the appropriate station so I could hear Johnny being interviewed. After a few questions and answers, where Johnny was obviously freewheeling a little as he dealt with his own crushing hangover, I heard the presenter say, ‘So, Johnny, we were expecting Ber-nard to be here with you today.’

  Johnny started flannelling, trying to buy himself time to think up an acceptable excuse beyond ‘He’s outside in the limo with his head in a bag of sick.’

  Johnny, bless him, did his best and actually came up w
ith something pretty good under the circumstances.

  ‘Oh, it’s really bad news,’ he said, summoning all the gravitas his stinking hangover could muster. ‘Bernard’s spent the night in hospital with his stomach ulcers.’ This was the story we’d put out in Chicago when we’d had to cancel the Detroit gig. Good thinking, Johnny, I thought. But then the DJ said, ‘Really? That’s strange, because we had Seal in just before you, and he said you and Ber-nard were both still partying when he left you at seven o’clock this morning.’

  Busted.

  Somehow, we got through the rest of the interviews. Once they were finished, we had to catch a flight to Dallas and, when we got to the airport, it was teeming with people. It was a holiday weekend and it seemed half the population of the city had planned a getaway. The green bag was quite full by this stage but I was feeling no better. I sat in the doorway of the airport with the automatic doors opening and closing around me. I could see a Holiday Inn across the road. I nudged Johnny and croaked, ‘Johnny, let’s check in there. This hangover’s not going away.’ He said, ‘We can’t, Bernard, we’ve got all this promo to do.’ Fair play to him, he was a trouper and I was a loser.

  So I stayed sitting there on the ground as family after family passed by, looking down at me as if I was some kind of alcoholic hobo. Eventually, I summoned the energy to stagger through the airport towards security, semi-delirious, convincing myself I’d be all right if I could just get on the plane. If I got on, reclined the seat, did a bit of meditation and controlled breathing, then I’d be all right. Yes, my poor, shrivelled, hangover-fogged brain suggested, then I’d definitely be all right.