New Order: Ceremony
A slow, extremely disappointing miasma. Considering their previous pedigree this is, em.... awful.
Nikki Sudden
Zigzag, April 81
New Order: Procession/Everything's Gone Green
This is religion. What a mistique is attached to New Order! They seem to be regarded as some sort of deity young men. A lot of this comes from the tragedy of the past. I ain't seen them live, but on the strength of 'Celebration' and this new one they seem very capable of making good records. Both songs are are 'up', dense and strong. 'Procession' is curiously uplifting with its jangling Byrds guitars and mellotron. 'Green' a total Morodor ripoff, but a nice clacking groove. For once, something lives up a bit to something.
4/5
Kris Needs
Zigzag, November 81.
New Order: Movement
After the excellent job they made of "Ceremony" it looked for a moment as if the unthinkable might happen - New Order might be better than Joy Division! Unfortunately, however, it is not "Ceremony" (a Joy Division song) but its disappointing successor "Procession" (a New Order song) that provides the better expectation of what to expect here.
Still, the opening track does offer a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. "Dreams Never End" is a marvellous dance track that builds and blossoms in much the same way "Ceremony" did - an irresistible invitation to join the danse macabre.
There, unfortunately, the fun stops. Only that track and the closer "Denial" possess any sort of drive or spirit, and of the rest I honestly found it difficult to listen to any two consecutive tracks without my attention wandering, such is the one-paced, resigned monotony of mood and material.
It's not difficult to see what's happened: after the loss of prime mover Ian Curtis, the others have turned inwards to each other - even incoming guitarist Gillian Gilbert lives with one of the group. In each other they have evidently found mutual support but no inspiration. The result has been a slide from motivation into that slough of despond once brilliantly identified by that excellent fanzine City Fun as "Mancunian New Miserabilist." (Hi, A Certain Ratio!)
Where Curtis was rivetting listening, New Order sound merely depressed in a vague and listless sort of way. They don't seem to have any particular gifts for melody or lyricism - indeed some of the lyrics (those you can make out) would have been greeted with hoots of derision had they emerged from some singer-songwriter or hippy band instead of the near mystical reverence that surrounds these four individuals.
This isn't quite a "headless chicken" case, though there are definite shades of the '70s fame-by-association syndrome here; would anybody really have been that interested if this drab affair had been a demo? Production and playing - drummer Steve Morris in particular - are excellent, but instrumental skills only take you so far.
One very good track, a couple of passable ones and a whole lot of uninspired grey filler - are you sure you want this album?
Ian Cranna
The Face, January 1982.
Life After Death
May 19th, 1980, was no ordinary Monday for the members of Joy Division. Bags were packed and goodbyes had been said. They were ready to leave for America, on their first rock & roll tour abroad. They had finished a new single, its title etched across a gravestone on the sleeve: LOVE WILL TEAR US APART.
But Joy Division - such a weird name for a group known for gloomy music and the forlorn voice of its singer - never left England that blue Monday. There was something about the promise of the trip that made lead singer Ian Curtis put a noose around his neck and hang himself the evening before. More goodbyes.
"On Sunday morning, I was turning my trousers up. Monday, I was screaming," remembers the band's drummer, Stephen Morris.
But Joy Division would soon become well known in America anyway - both for "Love Will Tear Us Apart", one of the most influential songs of the past years, and for Curtis' suicide, which put a lasting chill into the band's legacy.
With Curtis' death, Joy Division, which is what the prostitutes' area of Nazi concentration camps was called, officially came to an end. "I must admit Ian was the charismatic individual in the band," says Martin Hannett, the producer of the band's records. Because Curtis had been the focus of the first group, the three remaining members reorganized as New Order.
"There's life and there's death. We were still alive, so we thought we'd carry on doing it," says Morris. With a keyboardist added and guitarist Bernard Sumner taking over as lead singer, New Order is still very much an extension of Joy Division: like uncluttered landscapes in dark colors, New Order's music remains more mood than melody.
In Britain, partly by unwittingly riding the coattails of the synth-based pop bands, New Order has become one of the first-rank rock groups - the thinking man's Human League. In America, clubs are playing the band's twelve-inch dance single "Blue Monday" (which sold over a quarter of a million copies in England) and are beginning to break what may be the group's biggest stateside hit, "Confusion". That last and much ballyhooed dance track is the result of a collaboration with producer Arthur Baker, master of the New York street sound and the man responsible for the recent hits "Planet Rock," "Candy Girl" and "I.O.U."
Record buyers are also sniffing at a well-reviewed new album of uncharacteristically frisky music, Power, Corruption & Lies, New Order's second and best LP. To promote it, the band just made its second tour of America - only a small block of dates, by necessity.
"We don't have a major record company that gives us cocaine at the end of the tour," explains a downright cheery Stephen Morris, relaxing on a rainy night in June after a sold-out show at First Avenue, a huge Minneapolis club. The band's keyboard player, Gillian Gilbert, who lives with Morris in Manchester, was back in the room after a bit of "puddling" through the soaked parking lot at the Ambassador Motel.
The Minneapolis show had been, well, a bit somber. When few in the audience seemed moved by the new song "Thieves Like Us," Bernard Sumner - he's using that surname after having tired of Dicken (his family name) and Albrecht (his former stage name) - fairly spat out, "If you didn't like that, you must be Americans." Many seemed disappointed that the band wasn't a sad-faced Duran Duran, a party animal; more seemed upset that they didn't play the Joy Division songs.
"We did 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' once, on the anniversary of Ian's death," says the tall, thin Morris, whose drumming - a human sound that plays against the keyboard electronics - is really the band's signature. "But Joy Division doesn't exist anymore, and it would be foolish to kid people into believing it does."
Although a dark cloud still seems to hover over their music, their newest material is pointedly dance-oriented. "I'm not saying we play disco music," says Morris, "but there are some interesting time signatures knocking about in our songs." New Order wanted - and got - a true dance mix for "Confusion", the single they made with Arthur Baker, whose "Planet Rock" they'd admired.
"The fact that they make depressing-sounding records isn't what attracted me to them," says Baker. "But once we got in the studio, I used that the way I would use it in one of my own songs. I really do not write happy music myself. My songs are based in reality, on human situations. And that's what I liked about their stuff."
The band seems secure enough about letting a producer as willful as Baker get his hands on their sound, although, says Morris, "We're not Play-Doh." Yet producer Martin Hannett was given nearly as much credit as the band for Joy Division's records and for all but the latest New Order recordings. Hannett admits that the smashing, lively drum sound on the records was his contribution. "I made it go bang!" he says of Joy Division.
With Hannett, they worked at Strawberry Studios in Manchester, the city where the band members had held assorted jobs after finishing school - Bernard as an artist at a cartoon studio, Stephen in a textile mill and Peter Hook (whom they call Hooky) on the docks. And it was in Manchester that the three joined with Ian Curtis in 1976 for their first group, Warsaw (after a Bowie song, "Warsawa"), with little but punk inspiration. "It all started with the Sex Pistols. They could play terribly, and so could we!" says Morris delightedly. By 1977, they were calling themselves Joy Division.
They had little technical proficiency on their instruments, but a tiny independent company called Factory Records signed them anyway, on the strength of the impression they'd made on the label's founder, Tony Wilson. "In early '78, I went to this gig in Manchester where every local band played. Fifteen bands played, and I thought, 'None of these is really it,'" Wilson recalls. "Then Joy Division came onstage and played two numbers. And I thought to myself that the reason they're different is that they're onstage because they have something to say. The other bands are onstage because they want to be musicians. It's as different as chalk and cheese."
In what he calls "the look in their eyes, the tunes they played, their style of music," Wilson saw something special. So did Martin Hannett, who taught them how to use a studio. "Ideally a group should produce itself," says Hannett, "but when I met them, they were too young - they hadn't acquired any of those skills." He has ended his association with New Order now, and they produced the latest album themselves.
Like the other records they've made, the new album does not identify the band members or credit a particular player's contribution. This is part of New Order's philosophy: they oppose the "cult of personality" that infects rock & roll. You buy a record with music on it, why should you be interested in who's playing what?, they argue. "It's the group, not my name apart from the group," says Morris. They also frequently refuse to be photographed: part of the reason is the anti-personalities thing, the other is plain self-consciousness. All in all, they prefer to concentrate on the work, the music.
While Joy Division's lyrics were penned by Ian Curtis, New Order collaborates on the words to the songs. "We work loosely," says keyboard player Gillian Gilbert, 21 (the others are all twenty-six or twenty-seven). She claims she was hired on the strength of her ability to play "Jingle Bells" "It can be a month before a song happens," she says.
"Fate writes the lyrics, we do the rest," says Morris of their rehearsals, which take place in a room next to a cemetery. They say it's a creepy place, their neighboring graveyard, that would make a great location for a gothic-horror video. In fact, they've just bought their rehearsal hall from the gas company, and they'd like to turn it into a recording studio someday. The building cost a lot, they say, but that's what they do with their money - put it back into the band, buying state-of-the-art equipment and paying for the constant instrument repairs. They pay themselves only seventy pounds - roughly $110 - per week.
It may seem a pittance for a rock star to live on, but the members of New Order have rather modest hobbies, and solitary ones at that. Bernard likes to go for drives in his car and has a home computer; Peter goes scrambling on his motor bike; Gillian tends to a pet hamster; and Stephen fusses with graphics on his small computer. Bernard and Peter also go to concerts, socializing a bit, on Saturday nights; but Gillian and Stephen are "occupied with knocking down a wall and building it back up."
They also like to read, says Stephen: "Bernard's a slow, book-a-year reader, Hooky likes Scott Fitzgerald, Gillian really likes a book called The Serpent's Song, and I like Dostoevsky, he's really funny." They are not a group that is taken with politics. Nobody voted in the last election, Morris believes.
Most of their time seems to go to New Order, at the cemetery-rehearsal hall. A perfectly gloomy setting for a band that continues to market in glum stuff, some would say. "People are welcome to see us as whatever they want," says Morris. "If we're gloomy to them, we are. I'm not going to say, 'No, you've got it wrong, we're something else.' People associate death, gloom, suicide with us, but it's an albatross.
"We are not deliberately trying to get across the mood of the times," he adds. "We're not talking the unemployment blues."
Their rehearsal hall is just a short trip to the southern reaches of Manchester proper, where they all live, having grown up in nearby Salford and Macclesfield. Asked if the members of the group have been friends for long, Morris sighs. This is a band that carries a heavy history around with it. "We weren't friends a long time," he says, "but we're old friends now."
Interview by Debby Miller
Rolling Stone 15 September 1983
martin at work
growing away from new order
Part of an interview with New Order that appeared in The Face, July 1983.
Warsaw went into Pennine Sound Studio in December and emerged a few days later as Joy Division with an EP called "An Ideal For Living" that fell back on the sensibilities shaped by the progressive and avant-garde rock of the early Seventies but buried in the year of punk's cultural purge. Sensing a kind of desperate drive in these recordings, Tony Wilson signed Joy Division to his new label and the group began working with Strawberry Studio engineer Martin Hannett.
But not before a curious interlude. They fell in with Northern Soul DJ Richard Searling who wanted them to record a cover of N.F.Porter's Northern Soul classic "Keep On Keeping On" - which he planned to sell to the TK label, at the time part of RCA. "We tried to do it but we're fucking hopeless at cover versions," recalls Sumner. "We did do it in a way," says Hook. "We learnt the riff - that's as far as we could get - and we used it on 'Interzone'."
They spent five days in the studio with Searling recording their own material instead. The tapes, which they later bought back for £1,000, were virtually a demo of their first album. They highlight Martin Hannett's contribution to their music; the distinctive structures and mood are already there and the songs are complete. But the group are fighting against their natural introversion. They lack the restraint that would later allow them to simmer so insidiously in listeners' minds.
Hannett, who used to be a lab chemist, brought (not least) his fascination with electronics to the mixing desk. Boxes of the latest studio toys would arrive from the States. While the group rehearsed, Hannett would rig them up. He streamlined them, playing against recent fashion by dropping voice and guitar behind the bass and drums, and giving electronically enhanced definition to their ragged edges. Their first recordings with him appeared on a Factory sampler EP in 1978. An album, "Unknown Pleasures", followed soon after. Sparse, statuesque, monolithic, like a vast desolate landscape, it was musically original and emotionally harrowing.
Since their single "Temptation" last year, New Order have parted with Hannett and begun producing themselves. It was an amicable decision, they say, complicated by the fact that Hannett was suing Factory Products over the running of the company in which he was a director (but has since reportedly settled out of court). But the group don't deny that they learned from him.
"He taught us what to do very early on," says Hook. "We learnt the actual physics of recording from him, although we could have learned it from anybody. But in the end there was too much compromise from both sides."
"Producing ourselves we get much more satisfaction," adds Sumner. "We know what we want and we can do it. With Martin the songs often turned out different, sometimes better, sometimes not.
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