The Reading Festival had come at the end of a particularly gruelling tour schedule that was close to burning me out. Every summer, it seemed, we’d criss-cross America, and every summer things were getting bigger. The early days, when we’d play small club venues to five hundred people, sleep at someone’s house and move on to the next gig, seemed like a different world. In those days, everything had been both manageable and enjoyable. I had no desire to be famous; I wasn’t even that bothered about chart success. It was great if it happened, but I hadn’t set out actively to pursue it. For me, being in a band was mostly about the creativity and the lifestyle: I was lucky enough to do something I loved – creating music – for a living. As long as that continued, it was all right by me. World domination was not on my personal agenda, because I’ve seen people have a taste of success, become addicted to it and end up just wanting more and more. Keep chasing that particular dragon and one day you’ll find yourself with a tough comedown. In my experience, if you take it easy, appreciate what you’re doing and what it provides, it can last a long time. Burn bright or live long, that’s the simple choice.
I cared very much about the music, though. I found writing it utterly fascinating, and the creative process is something that’s always held me in its thrall. I never wanted to give that up, but I was becoming very unhappy.
As you might remember, before becoming a musician I’d been prevented from going to art college by circumstances beyond my control, something that had frustrated my attempts to make a living from art, which, at the time, was the only escape I could see from the beaten-down frustration of working-class life in northern England. Then the world of music suddenly opened up in front of me, transforming my life like nothing else ever could. I’d moved from finding myself parked in one of life’s culs-de-sac, thwarted by society, to being paid for doing something I love. This was my living. I felt incredibly lucky, and still do.
The other aspect of being a musician that I enjoyed before we became a huge commercial success was the social interaction: meeting people at gigs and travelling to a range of different countries. Take America as just one example. Americans were really friendly, they spoke the same language and it was usually sunny and warm. The cities we played in were generally interesting and the music coming out of those cities was often tremendous. It wasn’t just America either: I’d seen all sorts of countries and cities all around the world. It was a transient lifestyle, granted, but I made some good friends along the way.
As the years went by, the social side of things increased at the same rate as our popularity, so a New Order gig would become more and more like a party. We’d do the show and have people back to the dressing room afterwards. Thanks to our regular tours, we’d built up groups of friends in each city, and they’d come along expecting a party: they’d bring their friends, and their friends would bring their friends, and everyone would wind up backstage after the gig. By the time we reached the acid-house period, we had smoke machines, decks and strobes in the dressing room. Then we’d move on to a club, maybe two, and finish up by bringing the club back to the hotel, where we’d finish the party as the sun climbed into the sky. It was like this every night – every fucking night – and if, for whatever reason, it didn’t turn out that way, even for just one night, you’d feel disappointed.
At that age, though, you think you’re invincible and you don’t think about the toll that level of hedonism is taking. I felt we needed a managed retreat from this itinerant lifestyle and to spend more time at home: for one thing, my son Dylan had been born the previous year and I wanted to be around a bit more – for him and for my other son, James, now ten. I’d felt the strong gravitational pull of home and, inevitably, this had created friction with the band and the management, who wanted to tour, especially Hooky. He didn’t seem to mind being away from home for long periods, he seemed to relish it even, but the novelty of long tours had long ago started to wear thin for me. It wasn’t that I wanted to stop playing live altogether, not at all; I just didn’t want to prolong this endless litany of planes, hotels and venues we seemed to be locked into. Outside factors influenced this: Rob, I’m sure, was always trying to keep us out on the road because the organization as a whole needed money coming in. Without the regular income from the tours, it was harder to prop up the Haçienda.
While I could appreciate all this, I had to make sure my priorities were right. I knew that if we kept touring at the rate we were I was putting my health at risk and that I’d have only myself to blame. I had caned it as hard as I could, and no one but me is responsible for that, but I challenge anyone in that environment not to join in, to eschew the clubs, the limos, the drinks, the people you meet, and to go to bed early with a book instead. It’s nigh on impossible; it was just too easy to be swept along by the whole travelling circus of New Order on tour. I’m not complaining either – I loved it, it was really good fun – but it was having the unfortunate side effect of making me ill.
The after-effects seemed to hit me more than anyone else too. At airports in the mornings, I’d be running off to be sick in the toilets while the others were all eating and drinking as if nothing was amiss. We’d have been partying just as hard as each other, but yours truly seemed to be the one copping most of the consequences. And they were starting to exact a price.
There were issues away from the road as well: Factory’s notorious financial difficulties were particularly acute at this time. For the first time ever, they had another very successful group on the roster: the Happy Mondays had really taken off and were selling a lot of records. The problem was that Factory had to finance the making of records by both us and the Mondays as well as keeping the Haçienda going. Things were fine when the records were out there and selling, but when both bands were in the studio at the same time it meant a lot of money was going out and there’d be a significant amount of time before the resultant record sales would come in.
In those days, studio time for us and the Mondays could be very expensive. On top of that outlay, the Hacienda was haemorrhaging money at a terrific rate. In the middle of all this we’d been trying to make Republic, working away in the studio, all the while wondering if the studio bills were being paid. It was embarrassing for us having to work with engineers, given the possibility their time wouldn’t be paid for. At one point, Gillian came up with the suggestion that we should go on strike until Factory had sorted a few things out. It was an idea that gained traction among the band – but it would have been a very long strike.
There was friction developing within the band, too. We were by now writing more and more electronic music, things like ‘The Perfect Kiss’. As I mentioned earlier, Steve had, I think, initially felt that his status as drummer was being challenged: the nature of dance music dictates that a lot of the beats are programmed rather than played. Hooky probably also felt that his status as a bass player was being challenged for similar reasons. As Karl Bartos had noticed with Kraftwerk, when you’re writing electronic music, only one person can sit at the computer at a time, leaving everyone else sitting around waiting. This also gave the erroneous impression that one person was running the whole show. They weren’t: it was just a one-person activity that happened to take up a lot of time.
Despite all this, the music was really working for us. Now that we were a successful band playing to larger audiences, though, a lot of things had to change. We’d have to go on stage at 9 p.m. instead of 11 p.m., as we used to, for example, and we had to play encores and full 90-minute sets where, in previous years, we might have done forty, if you were lucky. We were in constant demand for interviews, there were meetings about all sorts of things and we rarely had any time to ourselves. I may sound like I’m begrudging the success, but I’m not: if people are paying a lot of money to come and see you at a big venue, you want to make it worth their while; and the bigger you become, the more demands on your time there are. But I could see things becoming visibly more corporate. There were far more suits in the dressing room after sh
ows than there used to be and I sensed that this juggernaut of success was going to be hard to slow down.
Chapter Nineteen
The tempest
Having a gun waved in my face proved an effective way of convincing me that things needed to change. On this particular night, after the Haçienda closed we’d ended up at a reggae party at a youth club in Moss Side. We arrived to find a large crowd of people jostling bad-temperedly at the door trying to get in, so not a good sign. Then I saw a friend of ours who had, let’s say, a certain amount of local influence. The crowd cleared for him and he took us inside, where, as we stood just inside the door, we could see a guy with a beard and a bright orange jacket trying to get out the same time a couple of hundred people were trying to get in. He was being a pain in the arse, quite frankly, pushing people out of the way, and in the end someone socked him in the face.
We thought no more about it, walked past a kitchen hatch and saw they were serving delicious-looking West Indian food. I bought a portion of chicken and dumplings and was standing up eating it out of a white polystyrene tray when I had what appeared to be a strange hallucination in my peripheral vision: it looked like all the people had turned into bulrushes, and were blowing against the walls. When I looked up, I realized this was no hallucination: everyone in the place was pressed hard against the walls, leaving the only people in the middle of the floor Mr Dickhead White Guy here with his tray of chicken, and a man in a balaclava and a bright orange jacket who happened to be brandishing a very large revolver. It was the guy who’d been punched. As disguises go, it was pretty ineffective, but it was the enormous gun in his hand, the one that everyone but me had clocked immediately, that was of more immediate concern. He was pacing around, looking for the person who’d punched him earlier and, as he passed, he waved the gun inches away from my face. I don’t think he looked at me, he was only interested in finding his assailant, but when he disappeared into another room I turned to Sarah and said, ‘I think we’d best go home now.’ When we got there, we found that Sarah’s father had been taken ill earlier in the evening and rushed to hospital, so we went straight there and remained with him for the rest of the night.
All in all, that night totally freaked me out. I’d had enough.
On top of this, I was asking myself some important questions. Did I want this pressure? Was this lifestyle making me happier, or just feeding my ego? Was giving myself a big pat on the back for commercial success healthy? I took time to weigh up the important things and realized that, for me, happiness is about finding the right balance between public and private life, work and home, music and family. There were money worries at Factory even though they had two of the most successful bands of the era on the books. New Order was in a tricky place creatively, yet people loved that music: it was working. Whichever way you turned, there seemed to be contradictions, and I was struggling with them.
Hooky was different. He loved the success and the trappings that went with it. He enjoyed the adulation, thrived on it. I enjoy it, of course, but only up to a point: it’s not the core of my existence. Also, I kept thinking back to how part of the message of punk was essentially ‘Fuck stardom’: keep your feet on the ground and don’t take yourself too seriously. Yet here we were, in danger of rising above our station and watching things drift away from our origins.
I decided I didn’t want to go out on the road as much any more. This was a problem for Hooky: I think it got in the way of his ambitions, and he resented me for it. For my part, I still felt I was getting bad vibes for pushing the band in the direction of electronic music, even though we were all reaping the benefits.
This had all come to a head just before Republic was released. Hooky, in particular, felt I had been taking over the creative side by writing the electronic songs on Technique. I said that they should all write stuff and I’d just concentrate on the vocals and we’d see if we could get the old equilibrium back that way. We were back at Real World, where Peter Gabriel had what was known as ‘The Pagoda’ to serve as a writing room. I’d sit in there writing lyrics while the band fed me the material they were working on. I’d be happier with some parts of the songs than others. Stephen Hague, the producer, would come in to see what progress I was making and I’d say something like, ‘Well, the chorus is great but I don’t think the verse works.’ I’d ask him to get the others to work on the verse while I worked on another song. Then, a week or so later, he’d ask me about the first song, and I’d say, ‘Well, they haven’t got back to me with the reworked verse yet.’ We were left with this bizarre political situation where everything was going through Stephen, which meant the whole process ground almost to a halt. Add to that the fact that I didn’t think some of the material was quite strong enough, and it made the writing and recording of that album very difficult indeed. The vibe between the whole band had deteriorated and I wasn’t enjoying it any more. I needed a break. We all did.
So, in 1993, we stopped working together as New Order for a while. While we never split up, it would be the best part of five years after that Reading show before we’d all stand on the same stage again.
The Haçienda situation limped on until 1994, and a meeting at which Steve, Gillian and I said we were heartily sick of it. Enough was enough and the three of us informed everyone else that we weren’t putting any more of our money into the club, because it was over. We needed to just let it go down. Rob and Hooky said they thought we could still turn it around and, even if we weren’t going to invest any more, they were going to keep it going. I pointed out that we were all in the same band and we were in the majority. Everything we did was decided democratically and we’d decided that we didn’t want to keep the whole disastrous escapade going any longer. We said that if they insisted on carrying on, it was their decision, but that it was obvious to anyone that they’d be wasting their time and money. But I still kept my shares in the Haçienda albeit as a sleeping partner. After all the money I’d invested I thought it was the right thing to do.
Despite this, the two of them kept at it for another two or three fruitless years, and the club sank further and further into dire financial straits. I don’t know how they were raising the money, but the pair of them were getting into a right state. As the rest of us had come to realize, the Haçienda was a problem that couldn’t be fixed and the only thing to do was shut it down, but they stubbornly persevered – even though they had to close the club temporarily again in 1997 due to yet more drug-related incidents.
Within weeks of reopening, the death knell finally sounded for the Haçienda. In June, some lad – I think he was from Liverpool – was chatting up a girl in the club who turned out to be the girlfriend of a gang member. This didn’t go down too well. As he left and walked across Whitworth Street, another member of the gang came up behind him and whacked him over the back of the head with a cosh. The guy went down in the road like a sack of spuds, whereupon the gang member got into his car and drove over him.
It just so happened that a minibus full of magistrates, who’d come to observe how things were going now the club had reopened, had just pulled up at that moment, and the whole thing played out right in front of them. I’ve heard that some of them were even splattered with blood.
Unsurprisingly, witnessing this horrific event didn’t make them particularly well disposed towards the Haçienda, and that was it: they closed it down for good.
That’s not the end of the Haçienda story, though. When it went into liquidation, there was a meeting I wasn’t invited to with the accountants. Rob and Hooky were there and it was decided that any money left over from the sale of the building and the interiors would go first to them to reimburse them for the extra money they’d invested after we’d turned off our financial spigots. Once that was done there was no money left to pay the rest of us back the hundreds of thousands of pounds we’d invested over the years. They got money back for the disastrous period they’d overseen at their own risk, but we didn’t receive anything at all. Steve, Gillian, the
Factory directors and I, we got sweet fuck-all. I’ve heard it mistakenly said that we wrote off our investment when we refused to put any more funds in. Steve and Gillian had sold their shares, but I hadn’t. I wrote nothing off. I just refused to keep pouring money into what was clearly a yawning chasm of financial disaster.
Hooky complained to me that Rob had received more money than he had out of the settlement and that Rob had been able to put a lot more money into the Haçienda. He said he was suspicious about where Rob had found this money and felt strongly that we should sack him. Hooky called a band meeting at which he declared that Rob had to go, but after everything that had happened, all the time we’d spent together and the fact that, for all his faults, I think and hope Rob meant well, we decided he was one of us, and we didn’t abandon our own. Hooky was the only one in favour. If we fired Rob, we thought, what would he do after all this time working with us? What else could he do? The rest of us felt that, whatever had happened, we trusted Rob, so he remained part of the team and we stuck together.
Recently, I read through some of the documentation, and I think Rob had put more money in and therefore potentially had the right to receive more money than Hooky. But, as is customary when it comes to matters New Order, it’s very complicated. Rob was paid as our manager but he was also, I believe, paid as a director of Factory. I think Rob must have ploughed both his New Order and any Factory money he might have got into the Haçienda. It seems Rob did put more in (and could have made more money had the Haçienda done well), but we received nothing and Factory itself went down in 1997 owing us royalties.
Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me Page 24