Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  In the studio, we’d elaborated on one of the piano melody lines and added words to it: ‘We’re playing for England/We’re playing this song/We’re singing for England/arrivederci, it’s one on one,’ which I thought was a great hook line. Once we were happy with that, we brought the players, Keith and the band into the studio together to record it. We’d devised a rap section in the middle of the song which Keith had written, and we asked for volunteers among the players to have a crack at it. To be fair, quite a lot of them gave it a good go, but let’s just say the lads’ talents lay in football and leave it at that. Famously, by far the winner of the battle of the rappers was John Barnes – he made a good job of it and was a very nice guy as well. (Steve still has a tape of the other players’ efforts somewhere, which is pretty funny.)

  When we made the B-side, which was an extended version of the song, we mixed it at Real World in Bath with an engineer called Richard Chappell, a born-again Christian who Terry had nicknamed Dickie the Christian. He had quite a strong West Country accent, which we thought had a certain charming quality to it, and when we asked him if he’d like to try the rap he readily consented. So that’s Dickie the Christian rapping on the B-side in his lilting, fey Bath accent: it’s about as far from gangsta rap as you could possibly imagine.

  We got together with the players again when we filmed the video not long before the squad left for Italy. Some of it was shot at an England game when a couple of guys from Factory went down to Wembley with a camera for a pre-World Cup friendly against Uruguay, so the action footage you see in the video was specially shot, but the majority was filmed in the course of one day in Liverpool.

  I was told the shoot was to be at Anfield and, for some reason, had decided the most appropriate attire for a World Cup video was an Elvis impersonator’s outfit. I was working at Johnny’s house on some Electronic material at the time and put on the Elvis costume there: a white flared jumpsuit covered with sequins, wig and sunglasses that gave you the full Elvis in Vegas experience, cut-price in cheap polyester. Johnny had two very large Alsatians back then and, as soon as I walked out of the studio as Elvis, they both went for me. I just about escaped with my life. I guess they weren’t fans of the King.

  As it was a beautiful sunny day, I drove to Anfield with the roof down. When I arrived, however, I found the stadium completely deserted. It turned out the shoot wasn’t at Anfield after all, it was several miles away at Liverpool’s Melwood training ground. So there I was, at Anfield, a United fan dressed as Elvis and sitting in a bright red convertible just as the schools were chucking out. Every time I pulled up at traffic lights the kids were hanging out of the bus windows shouting, ‘Hey, Elvis, you twat, where are you fokkin’ goin’?’

  When I’d finally arrived at Melwood and amused everyone with my tale of humiliating incompetence, the director broke it to me that he didn’t really think the Elvis suit worked and could I change into an England shirt instead. Why he thought that I’ll never know, but there is one brief shot of me wearing it in the video, in the car, alongside Keith, who’s wearing the wig.

  The FA loved ‘World In Motion’, it was released as a single and went to number one. England travelled to Italy and reached the semi-finals – because the song had spurred them on, obviously; it’s notable they’ve not done as well since – playing really well and only going out on penalties against West Germany.

  I think ‘World In Motion’ really broke the mould of football songs. Football and music should, in theory, make ideal bedfellows – their fan cultures are quite similar in many ways – but, traditionally, the two had never quite gelled. It seemed to me that, in previous years, the FA had just gone to Joe and Albert from the local British Legion to put a song together, or some cheesy cabaret artiste, so it took a bit of forward thinking on their behalf to come to us. Rather than yet more cheery singalong bollocks, we made the key message simply ‘express yourself’, which gave the song a very different ethos. It also came at a turning point for the game. The eighties were a pretty grim time for football fans: hooliganism was rife and there’d been the terrible disasters at Bradford City, Heysel and, just a year before the World Cup, Hillsborough, but the 1990 World Cup seemed to be the catalyst for things really starting to change. Whether ‘World In Motion’ played a part, I couldn’t really say, but the England team’s success at Italia ’90 certainly helped, the fanzine movement was in full swing and I think football fans began to change their mind-set and then the mind-set of the public at large. The tribalism remained to an extent – it’s what fuels football culture, after all – but the violent aggression that had gone with it reduced dramatically, and that long, hot summer of 1990 was, in hindsight, a crucial watershed for football. Fans were seeing joy and beauty in the game again. In connection with this, it might be telling that Keith had wanted to call the song ‘E for England …’

  When the song became a hit, everyone assumed I was a football expert, which I’m definitely not. I do think it is the beautiful game though, and, when there’s a good, exciting match on, there’s nothing better. I remember the 1999 European Cup final when Manchester United played Bayern Munich. I’d like to say I was there but instead I was stuck in a London hotel room with one of the worst hangovers I’ve ever had waiting to go out and shoot a video at one thirty in the morning. Bayern scored after something like six minutes and then blocked the goalmouth, parked the bus, and the rest of the match consisted of United trying to break down this wall of maroon and grey until injury time, when first Teddy Sheringham and then Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored to win the game. It was the most fantastic climax, one that showed just how exciting football can be. It wiped my hangover completely away.

  While football can still be a thrilling spectacle I think there’s too much money swirling around the game these days. Working-class fans are priced out and you can almost buy the trophies now. It’s surely unsustainable and has changed the priorities that made the game great in the first place. Rest assured I’m not just saying that because I’m a United fan living in a house full of City fans. Really, I’m not. No, sirree.

  Incidentally, on the very first day we went into the studio to work on ‘World In Motion’, Michael Powell died.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Burn bright, live long

  Meanwhile, back at the Haçienda, we were starting to experience serious problems with the gangs that were springing up like enterprising small businesses across the city. This meant that we had to get tougher and tougher bouncers on the door to do what was a pretty thankless job. On one occasion in 1991, a bouncer turned away a gang member who walked off jabbing his finger and shouting, ‘Right, I’m coming back and I’m coming back to shoot you, you bastard.’ ‘Yeah, OK, son, hurry up then,’ said the bouncer, but the guy did come back – carrying a machine gun. The bouncer ran through the club with the guy hot on his heels, reached the basement and found himself tugging at an exit door which turned out to be locked. He turned round to face the gunman, who pulled the trigger, only for, to his miraculous good fortune, the gun to jam.

  This was in January 1991, at which point we thought that enough was enough and shut the club down for what turned out to be five months. We were sick of it; someone was going to get seriously hurt or even killed. These guys with guns weren’t joking: they meant business and they were in our club. We were having emergency meetings about all sorts of dodgy characters, while, alarmingly, it turned out the gangs were also having emergency meetings – in the club.

  Although we closed voluntarily, we weren’t the only ones with padlocks on the doors as the whole of Manchester, basically, closed down for a while. Anderton had shut all the after-hours party venues, and some MP trying to make a name for himself had managed to push through a bill banning any outdoor gathering of more than twenty people with the sound of a repetitive beat. Eventually, the scene shifted a few miles out of the city, to places like Blackburn, Blackpool and Quadrant Park in Bootle. I began going to Quadrant Park, which turned out to be even heavier
than the Haçienda had become. It was a big club, holding about three or four thousand people, and a lot of friends from Manchester also gravitated there. It could get pretty tasty. I remember being in the toilet having a pee once when two or three big blokes came in, kicked in the door of one of the cubicles, dragged this guy out and smashed his head against the urinal where I was standing. A syringe fell out of his pocket into it. They were cops who’d been tipped off about the guy using in the toilets.

  On another occasion, a load of us from the Haçienda went to a party in a block of flats in Moston. We all squeezed into the lift and stood there waiting, but the lift wouldn’t move. There were about nine of us squashed in there, for a good thirty minutes, and people were starting to feel a bit panicky, worrying we were going to be stuck there all night, until the following exchange took place.

  ‘Did you press the button?’

  ‘No, I didn’t press it.’

  ‘I thought you’d pressed it …’

  ‘I didn’t press it.’

  ‘Well I saw someone press it. It was her.’

  ‘Don’t look at me, I didn’t press anything.’

  ‘Well who pressed it then?’

  Of course, it turned out no one had pressed the button; we’d all assumed somebody else had. Finally, I pushed the button, up we went and, oh, what a lovely party it turned out to be. There were no windows, for a start – we were fourteen floors up and someone had taken all the windows out, in the middle of winter, and an icy gale was whistling through the place with freezing bullets of rain. It was a right mess. I think in the end we spent more time in the lift than at the party, but strange as it sounds we did have a laugh at the time.

  The Haçienda reopened in May 1991. Not long afterwards, we were just about to board a flight to New York to begin a tour when we were handed a Manchester Evening News by the stewardess which bore a front-page headline that read something like ‘SIX HACIENDA DOORMEN STABBED IN FRENZIED KNIFE ATTACK’. Our hearts sank. Here we go again.

  As well as the aggravation, we as a band felt we were bankrolling the whole escapade. We’d been working hard earning money, and it was being ploughed into both the club and the label. As individuals, we were still on a token wage. We were never shown accounts (I suppose, equally, you could say we never asked to see any), nor was I ever clear in my mind what the band was earning from record sales. When we went on tour, we’d see a big wedge of money for that but, otherwise, we were on a basic hundred pounds a week with absolutely no idea how many albums we’d sold. We had a platinum-selling album in America in the compilation collection Substance – and I only know that because I was presented with a platinum disc by the American label – but the way we’d set things up all the income gleaned from record sales was going into the Haçienda rather than coming to us.

  But, you know what? We weren’t all that bothered, because life was fun and we were young. We didn’t really want much anyway: if I had a car to get around in and somewhere to live, I was happy. The band was making good music, my life was great and I’d pretty much got everything I wanted, which in terms of buying things wasn’t much. We trusted Rob implicitly – we had utter faith that, money-wise, he’d do the right thing. He did do the right thing too in his own way; he’d just got it wrong when it came to the Haçienda and, once he’d been sucked into the gravitational pull of the black hole on Whitworth Street, he couldn’t get out of it again.

  As well as its now-legendary money troubles, the violence focused on the Haçienda refused to go away and so did the gangs who gravitated towards the club. We learned that one of the gangs was even setting up its base in the Gay Traitor bar downstairs (it featured a large portrait of Anthony Blunt, who, like Tony, had been to Cambridge University). The whole thing was becoming heavier and heavier: we’d had the machine-gun incident, the knife attack and, on another occasion, a bouncer had been shot in the leg. Sarah had been physically threatened too: she went to pick something up from the Haçienda in my car one day and emerged to find someone sitting on the bonnet, a particularly nasty man known as ‘White Tony’, a well-known gangster, long dead now. I think there was some kind of connection between him and the Moors Murders – he was a cousin of one of the victims – but he was a really vicious scumbag. Sarah asked him to get off the car.

  ‘Talk to me like that again and I’ll take your fucking eye out,’ he said.

  She went back into the club and told one of the bouncers, who eventually managed to persuade White Tony to remove his back-side from the bonnet and warned Sarah to drive straight home. If anyone followed her, he said, she was to drive to a police station. White Tony was a dangerous, volatile, violent man who’d made plenty of enemies.

  In many ways, it wasn’t a pleasant time. As well as the Haçienda issues, I also had to deal with the death of my mother. After Jimmy died, my grandmother had moved into the bungalow in Swinton that my mother had shared with him. They could help each other, but it was extremely difficult for both of them: my mother could see and direct my grandmother, who was still completely blind, to reach things she couldn’t. Being away so often with the band, I couldn’t be around to help as much as I’d have liked, but I’d drive over whenever I could. A few years after Jimmy died, though, my mother met someone new: a very nice man called Eric. He collected miniature cars and had a camper van of which he was very proud, and he was very good to both my mother and grandmother, but in the late summer of 1991 my mother passed away.

  Quite a strange thing happened on the night she died: I had a dream in which I saw her slump forward in her wheelchair and, in it, I knew she was dead. It was very weird – one of those particularly vivid dreams that stays with you for the rest of the day. I was walking through our local town with Sarah and the kids the following day when a car nearly ran us all over, the driver sticking two fingers up at us as he passed. I told Sarah to take the kids and walk on, went to find this guy and we ended up having a brawl in a street full of shoppers on a busy Saturday afternoon that ended up in the local papers. It’s not something I’m proud of, but he’d nearly killed my wife and kids, and I’m nobody’s fool.

  It was a weird day all round. I’d woken up after a lucid dream about my mum dying, which affected my mood for the whole day, got up, gone out for breakfast and ended up rolling around in the street with this complete stranger. Then, when I got home, I received a call to tell me my mum had died in exactly the way I’d seen in my dream.

  Back at the Haçienda, as you can imagine, our bouncers needed to be pretty handy. Some of them were part of a crime family overseen by the Noonan Brothers – and these were supposed to be the good guys. That’s how heavy the situation had become. We were musicians – making records and playing gigs was our business – yet we were having to deal with gangs, guns and crime families with whom even the police weren’t keen to become involved. We tried so hard to do the right thing, but the whole scene had turned sour and I’d had enough; enough of having to attend crisis meetings, enough of the pressure, enough of the endless tours. I just wanted to make music.

  Apparently, Rob wanted us to keep touring in order to raise capital for the Haçienda, but I knew we would be effectively burning money that way, as it was clear to anyone that the ship was going down. Only ego was keeping the whole thing even vaguely afloat. When we’d returned from the gruelling 1993 tour – our first for four years – a meeting was arranged at Manchester Town Hall to inform us that an opportunity had come up to buy the building. Would you believe it, by sheer chance it would cost almost exactly the amount we had just earned across the Atlantic. It was explained carefully to us that the owners would sell the building to someone else if we didn’t buy it there and then and we’d lose everything. The band was effectively over a barrel. To nobody’s great surprise, it later transpired they needed more money than they had originally asked for to complete the purchase, so, given the apparent urgency of the situation, a bridging loan was taken out to make up the shortfall, with a whopping interest rate attached to it. Only o
nce the loan had been secured did it become clear that a mortgage to buy the building was out of the question because of the state of Factory’s accounts.

  The organization was already leaking money like an elephant with cystitis, and now we’d been left with a loan that cost double what the building’s already extortionate rent had been. Another key business decision had completely backfired.

  We looked at the situation as it stood in 1993: machine guns, knives, bouncers getting stabbed, dealing with the police (who hated us), gangs, violence – and after all that we were still making a loss, even with the acid-house explosion. It was clear the Haçienda was never going to work. We’d given it a good go, we thought, but it was just doomed to fail. Rob, however, was a gambler. I’m not – I did the lottery about three times when it first started and didn’t win anything, so that was it for me – but knowing Rob as I did, I knew it was his nature to risk carrying on, with the relentless optimism that luck would change and things would turn around. I couldn’t rely on luck and optimism, however. For a number of reasons, things had to change.

  At the Reading Festival on 29 August 1993 we finished what had been a barnstorming set with ‘Blue Monday’. As the familiar opening drumbeats thumped out of the PA to a rapturous roar of recognition from the huge crowd, we were to all appearances a band at the peak of its powers with the world at our feet. Our new album, Republic, had been released a few weeks earlier and gone to number one in the charts, just as its predecessor, Technique, had done, while ‘Regret’ had reached number four in the singles charts. Yet, when the final notes of ‘Blue Monday’ echoed around the Berkshire sky that night and we walked off stage with the cheering of the crowd ringing in our ears, it would be another five years, almost to the day, before we played together again. As ever with New Order, we didn’t really do things the conventional way.