Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  While I feel strongly that people deserve a clarification of the circumstances that surrounded Hooky’s departure from New Order – and I’ve gone into great detail here in order to set the record straight – I don’t really want to dwell on it further, because everything’s been so positive since he left the band. My final word on the subject is this: when assessing the situation Peter Hook created back in 2007 and its subsequent fallout, I think the best thing to do is not listen to what he says but to look at what he does.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The epilogue

  We were coming to the end of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ on stage at Carnegie Hall when a whirling dervish, shirtless beneath a dark grey suit and with lank, blond-highlighted locks flying, appeared next to me at the microphone. He stabbed his own mic at his right cheek, looked me right in the eye and joined me in singing, ‘Love, love will tear us apart again’ in a baritone growl that seemed to emanate from somewhere beneath the stage and possibly below the earth’s crust itself.

  I’ve had some pretty vivid dreams in my time, but performing ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ with Iggy Pop, one of my musical heroes and a huge influence on the music I’ve made, on stage at arguably the most prestigious venue in the world was no nocturnal fantasy. It was March 2014, it was real, it was happening. The final notes of the song faded away into the surge of the crowd’s roar, and before I’d even had the chance to lift my guitar over my head, Iggy was walking towards me, creasing his face into a huge smile and locking me in a back-thumping embrace. Over his shoulder in the wings I could see Philip Glass smiling, applauding and nodding his approval.

  Alfred Street to Carnegie Hall had been quite a journey. How on earth did I get here?

  I’d really enjoyed working on the Bad Lieutenant album Never Cry Another Tear. As had happened with Electronic, it was great to work and record with other musicians and play gigs with another good, tight live band. We’d written a really good set of songs, released an album of which I’m very proud and gone down a storm live wherever we’d played. I’d found the whole thing a positive and rewarding experience – apart from two disastrous attempts to tour America, that is.

  The first time, in 2009, we’d had to pull the tour literally as we were about to leave when last-minute issues with our visas emerged. It was happening to a lot of bands at that time, I think, but the news that we weren’t going after all only reached us when we were on the platform at the railway station about to set off for London to pick up our passports and head across the Atlantic. It was as infuriating as it was devastating. We were determined not to let down the people who’d bought tickets, however, and rescheduled the tour for a year later, adding the Coachella festival to the itinerary too. Again there was a visa problem, but just a delay on mine this time, so the rest of the band travelled to London slightly ahead of me while Rebecca also went down to ensure my visa came through without a hitch. She was due to pick it up early in the morning and the plan was that I’d meet her at Euston, pick up my passport and visa and head off to Heathrow to fly out to the States.

  The phone rang early that morning. Sarah answered and came into the bedroom holding the receiver just as I was zipping up my bag ready to go.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I said, irritated. ‘I can’t hang about, I’ve got a train to catch.’

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘you’re not going anywhere.’

  ‘What?’ I replied.

  ‘It’s Rebecca on the phone. You’re not going to believe this, but a volcano has erupted in Iceland and the ash cloud means that all flights have been grounded until further notice.’

  She was right: I couldn’t believe it. Not again.

  Rebecca said I should still go to London to wait until the situation became clearer, and I ended up checking into a hotel in Paddington packed with similarly stranded and anxious would-be travellers. All across Europe it was the same story: Johnny Marr and his band were stuck at a ferry port in Rotterdam and there were many more bands who couldn’t make it over to Coachella. After a day or two of waiting, it became clear we’d have to pull the tour again. To all the people that bought tickets for gigs on either or both those tours, I can’t emphasize enough how sorry I am. It’s scant consolation, I’m sure, but the band felt as bad about it as you did. If anything, it broke our spirits and pretty much hastened the end of the Bad Lieutenant project.

  Bad Lieutenant had been a fresh start for me in a way, but when it had run its natural course I was ready to start working with New Order again. I wasn’t the only one, either: it was soon obvious to the rest of us what we wanted and needed to do. I think Steve summed it up well when he said he wasn’t prepared to throw away thirty years of his life because one person had thrown their toys out of the pram. On top of this, when an old friend in desperate circumstances needed our help, the catalyst we needed for New Order to resume finally presented itself.

  Michael Shamberg, who you’ll remember as the man responsible for our pioneering early videos, had been spending a lot of time on this side of the Atlantic, particularly in Paris and Beirut. We’d kept in touch with him over the years and had always been happy to help whenever he needed it. In the late eighties he’d made a film called Salvation, for which we provided the music, including ‘Touched by the Hand of God’. We were under intense time pressure at that point and did all the songs for the film in one night, handing the final versions to a courier at eight o’clock in the morning because we’d never let Michael down. More recently, he’d made Souvenir in Paris, which starred Kristin Scott Thomas, and spent some time in Lebanon producing a film called P.S. Beirut. However, Michael had left Beirut with a mystery illness so serious that he’d fallen into a coma in hospital in London. He emerged from the coma after a time but was still incredibly ill and relying on support from UK-based friends and his partner, Miranda. After a series of tests, the doctors concluded it was some kind of viral brain illness – the effects looked to me like those of motor neurone disease – and Michael spent a lot of time in London until he was well enough to return to New York. He was by no means recovered, however, and still required constant care. In 2011, we heard that Michael was really ill again and his medical bills were crippling him (we all know what the American welfare state is like: there isn’t one). We wanted to help.

  My thoughts turned to how we might be able to best help him. Bad Lieutenant were playing much smaller gigs and the amount of records we were selling wasn’t massive. Realistically, Never Cry Another Tear had reached the end of its life cycle, and my time with the band had given me the opportunity to take stock away from New Order to the point where I could see the wood for the trees again. Steve and Gillian had been spending most of their time looking after their daughter, whose medical condition required care, and Gillian herself had fought and now won her battle with breast cancer. She was ready to come back into the throng for the first time since 2001, and was keen to do so because it was a part of her life that she loved and had missed; and so was Steve. I could see where the future lay. It was time for New Order to start working again.

  With Hooky having moved on to pursue his own projects, we needed a new bass player, and the obvious choice was Tom Chapman. Tom had been involved with Bad Lieutenant, playing our live shows and appearing on a couple of tracks on the album. Our original bass player, Alex James from Blur, lives down south in the Cotswolds, while we’re up north – where, you know, the real men live – and there was just too much to-ing and fro-ing up and down the country carting gear backwards and forwards for Alex. Jake Evans, who played guitar on the album, also played bass on some of the tracks and clearly he couldn’t play both guitar and bass live. Tom got the job. When he came in to audition I think we gave him the impression that we’d already auditioned about twenty bass players when we were actually only auditioning him. Tom’s a really nice person, which was important, and he plays really well. He fits in perfectly. When we asked him to join New Order, it can’t have been as straightforward a decision as it might have se
emed: after all, he had some pretty big shoes to fill. But Tom has a very sanguine attitude towards life and the transition was absolutely seamless, for us and for him. He’s a very flexible musician too: as well as all the old material, he’s capable of playing in a range of different styles, something that brings us an extra dimension.

  Phil Cunningham was also keen to get going again. Phil had arrived in 2001 when Gillian had to take her sabbatical. I knew Phil through Johnny; he’d been in a very successful band called Marion, who were part of the Britpop scene in the nineties and had then done some live television work with us in Electronic. Next, he slid in as an extra pair of hands for Johnny Marr when we did a very guitar-based album in Twisted Tenderness, so when Gillian had to take a back seat it was logical that Phil should step in. He fits in really well with the rest of the band: he’s got an easy-going personality and I’m sure he won’t mind me saying that he’s also, in an endearing way, occasionally a bit of a plonker. He’s a good person to be around, a good person to have around and he’s a very good guitarist. Also, Tom’s arrival was a fillip for Philip – for one thing they’re good friends anyway, but it also meant that, after a decade in New Order, he was no longer ‘the new bloke’.

  Once we had everyone on board, we scheduled three concerts, two of them in continental Europe. Our first gig in five years would be at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels on 17 October, with another at the Bataclan in Paris the following night (our agent Ian had told us the Bataclan was the hottest place in town to play, and he was right about that – it was unbelievably fucking hot: in its eighty-to a hundred-year history, they’d never got round to putting in any ventilation). The third gig was at the Troxy in London in December, a lovely venue, which allowed us to recoup the costs of the other two gigs and ensure we could give all the proceeds to Michael. All these shows went wonderfully well and we got a great live album out of the Troxy show.

  The first two gigs in particular garnered a lot of attention and, as soon as they were announced, Rebecca and Andy began receiving calls from agents and promoters around the world asking if we’d play. It was overwhelming and instantaneous: before the Troxy show in December we even managed to fit in three South American concerts. South American crowds are amazing: they sure wear their hearts on their sleeves, and the gigs were as great as the caipirinhas.

  In 2012, the whole thing snowballed and we were inundated with offers: I think we played fifty concerts in a year – including the London Olympics closing ceremony concert in Hyde Park – as part of what, effectively, turned into a world tour. It was the busiest year for touring I’d done in a long time, possibly the busiest ever. We played at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami, an amazing event in the Bay Park area in front of the skyscrapers, on to which video images were projected. We toured Britain, Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and finished the year with a string of dates in the US and Canada.

  I know some people had wondered whether one of the original members of the band leaving might cool interest in the band a little, especially among the fans, but the gigs were incredibly well-received – the initial three sold out in a matter of minutes. Everything about New Order was positive again: the gigs were all successful (we won an award for the best festival performance of the year for our live show at the Festival No. 6 in Portmeirion in 2012), the vibe was good and we were having fun again. I’ve not enjoyed touring as much in many years. We still try and help out Michael whenever he can, he’s still not very well, but as with the miners’ benefit in 1984, it seemed that, while benefiting others, by happy coincidence we’d also ended up benefiting ourselves.

  Early in 2014, a letter arrived from Philip Glass asking if I and two members of the band would go over for an annual concert he stages to benefit an organization called Tibet House, which lobbies for the preservation of Tibetan culture and awareness of its situation. I had a bit of affinity for Tibet because, when I was a teenager, my cousin Steve and I read avidly the work of a Tibetan monk called Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, which became a bit of a bible for us. The books contained a great deal of moral and spiritual guidance: how you should conduct yourself, for example, the effects of drug taking on the soul and how the Tibetans used spiritual teaching to improve themselves and their minds. Steve and I were pretty enthralled by this and, when we read of how the monks in the Himalayas drank hot butter tea, we tried to make some ourselves. Let’s just say we only tried it once. Take it from me, butter works much better on toast.

  I’d also read in my comic books about Tibetan monks with amazing powers acquired through meditation: one was levitation; another was that they could put a blanket soaked in icy water over themselves and it would turn to steam. Also – in comic books at least – they could run incredible distances by using a special technique of superhuman strides that enabled them to cover great distances in a short time. Tibet seemed like it must be a magical place. It certainly sounded different to Salford.

  So when I received the letter from Philip explaining how the organization was dedicated to the preservation of Tibetan culture, my teenage Tibetan learnings came flooding back and it really piqued my interest. (It later transpired, incidentally, that Lobsang Rampa was actually a plumber from Plymouth called Cyril. When questioned about him, the Dalai Lama said something along the lines of ‘While we do not accept Lobsang Rampa as a true Tibetan monk, we applaud anyone that spreads the message about our nation,’ which was pretty gracious of him.)

  Whatever the nature of the occasion, the opportunity to work with Philip Glass is a no-brainer for any musician. Philip is one of our finest contemporary composers and I’ve been a fan of his for a long time. I remember being in London recording a good few years ago, and every night we’d return from the studio to the flat we were staying in to watch Koyaanisqatsi, an absolutely hypnotic combination of images and music for which Philip had written the most fantastic soundtrack. Since then, I’ve explored his other work, and it’s incredible stuff. Occasionally, I’ve heard criticism that it’s too repetitive, but look at club music, house music, r ’n’ b: it’s all repetitive, and there can be a great beauty in repetition. Philip’s music isn’t simply repetitive, though; his pieces evolve slowly, like a wave approaching the shore, subtly changing shape and form as they build to a climax. I find his music as evocative to listen to as watching the ocean; seeing the waves build and build then break on the sand. The crashing of waves is repetitive, but each is different, each builds in its own way with its own energy and harmonics, and Philip’s music works in exactly the same way.

  I spoke to Philip on the phone – I think he actually called me, from a Mexican airport – and he explained a bit more about the content and context of the evening. The Tibet House concert has been an annual event for more than twenty-five years now, he told me, and has always had a strong theme of collaboration. He said that he’d like us to collaborate with some of the other musicians involved: Patti Smith, The National and, perhaps most excitingly for me, Iggy Pop. He told me Patti’s band was available if we needed them and the Scorchio Quartet would be there too.

  This gave me an idea. A Manchester poet called Mike Garry had written a fantastic poem about Tony Wilson called ‘Saint Anthony’. The string arranger Joe Duddell, who’s probably best known for his work with Elbow, had taken the New Order song ‘Your Silent Face’ and arranged it for a string quartet with Mike reading the poem over the top of it. I really liked it: we performed it at an amazing gig at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in 2013, in the shadow of the enormous Lovell Telescope, and it went down fantastically well.

  I sent the poem over to Philip, and he loved it. He told me Allen Ginsberg had been a big part of the event until his death in 1997 and jumped at the idea of having some poetry on the night as a way of continuing Allen’s legacy. When I contacted Mike and told him all this, he nearly fell off his chair.

  As for collaboration with the other artists, I had another idea. We’d written a song called ‘Californian Grass’ which appeared on the Lost Sirens albu
m of songs we’d recorded while writing Waiting for the Sirens’ Call. We’d written far more songs than we needed, deliberately so, the idea being that we’d write two albums at once and not have to go away again to record for a long time. The album that became Lost Sirens was therefore designed to be the album that followed Waiting for the Sirens’ Call. Obviously, in the meantime, certain things had changed, which meant that Lost Sirens didn’t come out until 2013, a decade after the songs had been recorded. It saddens me a little that Lost Sirens is thought of as an album of outtakes from Waiting for the Sirens’ Call, because it really isn’t, it’s actually a second, unfinished album – unfinished because, among other issues, Hooky had refused to come into the studio and finish it and then dragged his heels over its release.

  I’d written ‘Californian Grass’ in my home studio. The way we normally work is to write, arrange and record the music first, coming up with a track that sounds good as an instrumental. When that track has reached a level where I feel inspired to take it further, I’ll bring it back to the little room I use in my house as a studio, burn the midnight oil and write some melodies, lyrics and vocals over the top of it. I wrestled a bit with ‘Californian Grass’, because it happened to be in an awkward key for me: it was pitched pretty low. I’m a high tenor (some might have you believe that at certain stages of my career I’ve been a very high tenor), but the verses in particular were a struggle for my vocal register. I distinctly remember sitting in my studio late one night and thinking, It’s a bit Iggy, that vocal, it’s exactly the kind of phrasing and pitch he’d use.

  When I learned that Iggy was also doing the Tibet House concert a light bulb went on over my head. I wondered whether he’d be interested in collaborating on ‘Californian Grass’. After all, his music was partly responsible for the band and I being around today. You might recall that the first time I went round to Ian’s house after giving him the job of singer, the first time we spent any significant time together, he played me Iggy’s version of ‘China Girl’ from The Idiot, which had been released that very day. I’d been blown away by it and been a fan of Iggy’s ever since. He’s always been a key influence from the early days of Joy Division and I thought working with him would be incredibly exciting.