Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  I kept up this hopeful reverie until being forced back to my senses at the security checkpoint. When I was the next person about to go through the metal detectors I realized that in my hand I was still holding the big green bag of sick. One of the security guys had sensed my discomfort and was regarding me with a vague hint of suspicion. I thought, If I dump the bag now he’s going to look inside it and assume I’m some kind of lunatic carrying a bag of puke around, or, worse, conclude that I’m carrying a bomb made from some heady cocktail of volatile liquids. My only option, I realized, was to play it absolutely straight, place the bag on the conveyor belt and act as if nothing was amiss.

  So that’s what I did and – wouldn’t you know it? – the bag passed through without incident. Maybe I looked so crazy they’d kept watching me rather than the screen, but I walked through, picked up the bag of vomit, strolled off nonchalantly as if it contained nothing more than a copy of Newsweek, a packet of mints and a paperback, boarded the plane and started on the road to recovery. And that was it: we didn’t go out again after that. In fact, I don’t think Johnny’s had a drink since.

  Despite our attempts to drown the promotion in puke, the album did very well and reached number two in the UK charts. I remember being a bit disappointed with this at the time but, looking back, it was bloody good for a new band nobody had ever heard of.

  We went on to make two more albums after that, Raise the Pressure and Twisted Tenderness. Working with Johnny was cool, and it was somehow more intense, it being just the two of us: it was a bit like playing badminton or passing a baton back and forth. It was either him on the spot having to come up with something, or me, and producing it ourselves added to it all. But it was a healthy kind of sink-or-swim creative pressure, and we thrived.

  The premise of Electronic was that the core of the band would be kept to the two of us but we’d bring in different guest artists. On Electronic it had been the Pet Shop Boys, and on 1994’s Raise the Pressure it was Karl Bartos from Kraftwerk. I’m a massive Kraftwerk fan, and always have been. I knew Karl had left Kraftwerk a few years before, thought how great it would be to work with him and wondered if he might be up for doing something.

  When I contacted him, at first I think he was a bit suspicious of this strange English guy appearing out of the blue and babbling at him about making an album together, but he kindly consented to meet us in Düsseldorf and took us out for a meal (a strange combination of asparagus and ice cream, as I recall), at the conclusion of which he agreed to come over and make Raise the Pressure with us.

  When we started work, again there was a getting-to-know-you period. All three of us were aware of our respective legacies as musicians but didn’t yet know what to make of each other when we were put together in a studio. It’s a strange dichotomy: you really have to make an album with someone before you know them, but at the same time you need to know them in order to make the album. I think Karl had had a few frustrations with Kraftwerk, because their output hadn’t moved as quickly as he’d have liked. In those days, there was a huge amount of programming required to obtain good results, and only one person at a time could really do that. It was a similar situation to the one I’d found with the electronic side of New Order: it was supposed to be a group effort but, obviously, only one person can use a mouse at any one time. I think he’d got fed up with all the sitting around that went with the perfectionist pace of the Kraftwerk method and decided to go it alone. It can be very easy to entrench oneself in technology, because you want to stay ahead of the game by using the very latest gear. This means learning new machines as they become available: manual work, in the sense that you’re using a manual.

  Unfortunately for Karl, when he came to work with Electronic on Raise the Pressure, we lost our engineer, Owen Morris, midstream, which, until we found Jim Spencer, left Johnny and I trying to engineer the album as well as write, arrange and play it. This inevitably slowed the whole process down.

  At that time I was also participating in a fly-on-the-wall television documentary about depression that was being put together by a well-known psychologist. The premise of the show was quite interesting: the psychologist’s theory echoed those of Freud and Jung, that artists were basically fucked-up people whose art was a symptom of their illness. He’d taken it a step further, however, and posited that this creative spark was specifically due to low serotonin levels. If you gave an artist Prozac, he suggested, it would raise his or her serotonin levels and, as a result, kill their art. In hindsight, participating in a programme designed to confirm this was maybe not such a great idea during the recording of an album.

  I’d read a lot about Prozac. I didn’t have full-blown depression, but I was certainly disposed towards it, possibly due to my family history: perhaps all the illness I’d had to witness while growing up inevitably made me a little emotionally vulnerable. Also, frankly, I’d been drinking too much, something that elevates the level of serotonin in your brain one day and depletes it the next: an unhealthy contributory factor in someone naturally prone to depression. I won’t say I had a chronic manifestation of the condition. I certainly had the blues at times, and the opportunity to take Prozac and observe its effects under supervision intrigued me. I agreed to take part, began a course of Prozac and waited to see what would happen. It worked stunningly well, banishing any and all of my depressive feelings in the same way an aspirin disperses a headache.

  People say there are some potentially nasty side effects of taking Prozac, that it causes suicide because of the terrible withdrawal symptoms, but that wasn’t my experience at all. I didn’t suffer any more withdrawal symptoms coming off Prozac than I do after a couple of paracetamol. Prozac doesn’t make you feel high, or blissed out like Valium or anything like that. If you think of your moods as a sine wave, Prozac just gives you lower peaks and shallower dips, helping to keep you on a more even keel. In a chemical way, it corrects the brain chemistry to introduce more serotonin, while, cognitively, it gets you used to being in a positive frame of mind. It worked like a charm for me and I’m grateful to the programme for introducing me to it – but certainly not for anything else.

  One day after the filming had finished I was driving up the motorway from somewhere down south and had Radio 1 playing in the car. The news came on at the top of the hour, and a breathless voice said, ‘Bernard Sumner admits that he’s been suffering from writer’s block for a year and a half, but since taking Prozac he’s been cured,’ followed by a plug for the television programme. According to the promo, I’d apparently be laying bare my writer’s-block hell in the nation’s living rooms, which certainly came as news to me as I didn’t have writer’s block, and if I had, why would I have taken part in an experiment that might make it worse? I got home to find that a VHS of the programme had arrived and I immediately sat down to watch it. Those sine waves I mentioned that were levelled off by the Prozac? The longer I watched, the more they went right off the scale. The programme had been edited to suggest I’d been suffering from a crippling bout of writer’s block and the Prozac had got me writing songs again. Completely the opposite of what I’d been told by the psychologist and nothing even close to what actually happened.

  I went ballistic. I phoned the guy up, threatening legal action and all sorts, asking what the fuck was going on, why had he made up this bullshit? He was honest enough to admit the programme’s producer had wanted to make it a bit juicier – I guess ‘Bernard Sumner feels a bit better about things in general’ wouldn’t have made the Radio 1 news – so I said, ‘Well, make it as juicy as you like, but if you broadcast what I’ve just watched then I promise you I will sue the hairs off your bollocks.’ When the programme went out the following week, they had re-edited the programme, slightly, but the original version had already been sent out to the press. It did a great disservice not only to me, but also to both the drug and the psychologist, whose original concept had been sound. With the press having received the ‘juicy’ version, all the coverage reflected that rather th
an the reality of the programme as it was actually broadcast. Never again will I participate in a fly-on-the-wall documentary.

  All this was going on while we were recording – perhaps appropriately – Raise the Pressure. We’d assumed that after all those years as a member of Kraftwerk, Karl would be Mr Electronic Music, but the music he’d really loved since he was growing up in the sixties was The Beatles and he’d thought the album would give him the opportunity to try making guitar music. It turned out to be a messy, difficult album: Karl had been frustrated by things not moving fast enough with Kraftwerk, and now here he was with Electronic finding things again creeping along at a glacial pace. In the meantime, I was battling a few demons, cleaning myself up and threatening psychologists with legal action, so it was all rather fraught, but I really liked Karl and am lucky enough still to regard him as a great friend. He lives in Hamburg now and, whenever I’m there, which isn’t as often as I’d like, we’ll meet up and have a great laugh together. He’s got a brilliant sense of humour, knows exactly what sort of a twat I am and doesn’t let me get away with anything.

  I still count Johnny among my good friends too, and look back at the times with Electronic with great affection. I think we made a good team, suiting each other musically, temperamentally and socially. He’s a great guy, but I have to say this – and Johnny, if you’re reading this, you know it’s true – he talks a lot. When I come off the phone to him, my ear is hot and bright red and I’ve barely managed to get a word in edgeways. He’s such an enthusiastic person about life, and about music in particular, and is always keen to convey that enthusiasm to you at length.

  He lives for music, to an extent that borders on obsession. I did try and broaden his interests a couple of times: I took him on a sailing holiday once, for the entirety of which he talked about music. Then Sarah, Johnny, Ange, his wife, and I went to a hotel in a beautiful part of the countryside where I was delighted to coax him out walking with me in the hills. It was a stunningly beautiful place but as we walked amongst this incredible scenery he stared at the ground and … talked about music. I’ve been for many meals with Johnny in some really nice restaurants over the years where, without fail, he’s … talked about music. I’ve given up now, really, but he has a great sense of humour and is a really decent person. He’s very observant and can sum people up very well (he does some great impressions too), and is far more disciplined than I am: I think he lives on a diet of nuts, seeds, berries and distilled water and jogs something like twenty miles a day.

  Johnny is a person who’s always stuck to his guns and achieves what he does through hard work. He’s definitely a grafter. We both did the Lollapalooza tour in South America recently, despite his having fractured his hand just before he left. He told me he’d been out jogging, lost concentration for a moment and the next thing he knew he was on the floor, having banged his face and done serious damage to his hand. The concussion may have affected his memory slightly, because a little bird told me that he’d actually run smack into a lamp post, probably while checking himself out in a shop window.

  He’s great to work with and I would never rule out working with him again: we know each other well and, these days, we’re both a bit more comfortable in our own skins. It’s funny, in the later days of Electronic, Johnny would say that I’d become more like him while he’d become more like me. I think it’s even more the case since we’ve stopped working together. One key difference, however, is that you’ll never catch me running full tilt into a lamp post.

  I’ve leapt ahead a little by telling the full story of Electronic, so let’s navigate back to the dawn of a decade and a glorious hot summer when we provided the soundtrack as eleven men in white shirts captured the mood, hopes and dreams of a nation.

  Chapter Seventeen

  We’re singing for England

  Early in 1988, Tony had asked us to put some music together for a TV series he was making for Granada called Best and Marsh. It was a show that looked back to the glory days of football in the seventies – pre-dating the craze for football nostalgia that would be a feature of the nineties, so ahead of its time – which Tony presented alongside George Best and Rodney Marsh. They needed a theme tune, so Tony asked us to provide one and we were happy to oblige, even if the finished product was a little half-baked: we were about to go away on tour and only just managed to squeeze it in before we left. The rush meant that it certainly wasn’t the best piece of music we’ve ever made and it will never appear in any lists of great television themes, but it did create a link between us and football. Someone at the Football Association must have seen the programme because, early in 1990, we received an invitation to contribute a song for England in the run-up to that summer’s World Cup in Italy.

  Strange as it may sound, given that ‘World In Motion’ turned out to be a number-one single, there was a bit of a division within the band over whether we should do it or not. When the invitation arrived we were also exploring the possibility of working with Michael Powell, the film director famous for films like Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death. He worked closely with Emeric Pressburger, and I think I mentioned earlier what a huge fan I am of theirs: I used to have the films playing as I built synthesizers late into the night in the earliest days of New Order.

  We travelled down to London to see Michael and his wife, Thelma, who was a film editor of considerable note, and hear what he had in mind. He was a lovely guy, a real character, and wore a very distinctive tartan suit. Michael’s idea was to shoot a short film based on a poem called ‘The Sands of Dee’ by Charles Kingsley (probably most famous for writing The Water Babies) about a young shepherdess who is caught out by the incoming tide on the sands of the River Dee, which winds its way through Chester and out into the Irish Sea (I don’t know when Michael had last been there, but there’s a dirty big oil refinery there now). The estuary is a big one, where the tide comes in and goes out very quickly, which leads to the protagonist of the poem becoming stranded in the quicksand. Michael’s plan was to shoot a dramatization of the poem with Tilda Swinton as the shepherdess and our music as the soundtrack (‘Age of Consent’, specifically, which was also the name of one of the last major films Michael made, starring James Mason) – as long as we could provide funding to the tune of about £100,000.

  As a Michael Powell fan, I was really keen to work with him. Steve, also a fan, but probably not as obsessively as me, was also in favour, because he thought it was a great idea. The trouble was that it clashed with the FA’s invitation, and we didn’t have time to do both. It was a really tough decision, but we had to be pragmatic: doing the project with Michael would cost us a hundred grand, money there was a chance we wouldn’t see again. Even Tony wrinkled his nose at the cost, but we were doing pretty well at the time and could have found the money if we’d really wanted to do it (or, more to the point, if it had been Tony’s idea in the first place). In the end we went with the World Cup song.

  The FA’s invitation provided an interesting challenge for us. Traditionally, football songs had always been awful, usually consisting of the team lined up in matching sensible knitwear singing some kind of anthemic rubbish that was supposed to stir the loins and evoke national pride. ‘Back Home’, released for the 1970 World Cup, was a prime example of the phenomenon, and there’d always been the annual embarrassment of the Cup Final teams on Top of the Pops looking bemused beneath their perms and making token attempts to mouth vacuous, upbeat words cobbled together on the back of an envelope by some local club singer. These things always seemed badly thought out and it was almost as if they were designed to make the players look like idiots. We weren’t necessarily setting out to change the face of football records, but we wanted to write a good song, one the players could get behind and enjoy being a part of.

  My relationship with football had become distant in the years since I’d become a busy professional musician. I was really into it when I was younger and am a Manchester United fan – a rare one who�
�s actually from Salford. I used to go regularly to Old Trafford as a kid to see George Best, and when United won the European Cup in 1968 I went to see them parade the trophy in Albert Square. I’ve mixed memories of that, however, as I was only a kid and was nearly suffocated in the crush of people. My interest had dimmed by 1990, though; I suppose I grew out of football and became interested in other things.

  So I’m no football expert, but I am a lyricist, so I set out to write something different to the usual ‘we’re going to bring the trophy back, hurrah!’ kind of thing. In order to make that happen, I enlisted a bit of help. We were all big fans of the Comic Strip Presents comedy series and had seen Keith Allen in one called The Yob, a spoof on the film The Fly, in which Keith is transformed from a poncey London pop-video director into a full-on football hooligan. We thought it was hilarious, Keith was brilliant in the starring role and, knowing he was a football fan, we approached him with regard to co-writing the lyrics. I didn’t know Keith then: he’d appeared with us at the miners’ benefit years before, had been to a party at my house once – I don’t know how he’d ended up there – and I’d seen him at the Haçienda a couple of times, but we were only on nodding terms at best. It turned out, though, that bringing Keith in was exactly the right thing to do.

  We wrote ‘World In Motion’ as we would any other track, with each of us making a contribution. Steve and Gillian worked on the first part of the song and I wrote the second, which meant that, appropriately for a football record, it’s a song of two halves. We recorded the song in the glamorous surroundings of Slough, because it was close to England’s training ground, which is where the players would be coming in from to record their vocal contributions. The night before the recording I’d done a guest spot for 808 State at the G-Mex on a track called ‘Spanish Heart’ and ended up slightly tipsy afterwards. I had a stinking hangover the next day when I was driven down with Tony and Keith and, when we arrived, I still had my head in a bucket. This probably didn’t set much of an example to the footballers, but perhaps it reinforced their existing impression of musicians. The team came in – Paul Gascoigne, John Barnes, Peter Beardsley, Chris Waddle and the rest (Gazza took one look at the mixing desk and said, ‘Fucking hell, man, that’s a big organ’) – and, if they were nervous about what lay ahead, the buckets of champagne bottles that greeted them soon had them suitably relaxed.