New Order Quotes
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It was a bit nerve-wracking but a lot of fun.
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In the Seventies, album artwork became really beautiful items. The whole process of doing an album sleeve, it became a very artistic thing.
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That was the thing about Joy Division: writing the songs was dead easy because the group was really balanced; we had a great guitarist, a great drummer, a great bass player, a great singer.
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Our record was uploaded on the internet a long time before the release date, losing us unknown amounts of sales. Warners tracked it and found it was a Rolling Stone journalist’s listening copy. They even had his name. Barney was livid, wanting to prosecute the guy immediately, but on reflection Warners thought better of it. I guess they needed Rolling Stone. Our sales on Get Ready would be about 300,000 worldwide. Republic sold three million. Warners reckoned that drop was entirely due to illegal file-sharing.
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I think the most important thing about what musicians do is the music. You can be as big an arsehole as you want but if you're not making good music, you won't get away with it.
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Music used to be a more personal thing, and it defined who you were. Now it's like wallpaper.
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It's quite ironic I suppose, it's that thing about being in a group when you all start out as friends and then invariably end up hating each other. So I just thought they needed telling really, in case they were labouring under the apprehension that they were still friends.
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What happened was that one of the engineers must have heard the Sunkist vocal tape and for reasons best known to himself – shits and giggles, probably – cobbled together a bootleg, a Sunkist ‘Blue Monday’ take for fun. He obviously gave it to someone, who gave it to someone . . . until eventually it ended up with Sunkist, who grabbed it, put their logo on it, did an edit using some of the ‘Touched by the Hand of God’ video and issued it as an official advert. We protested and they ended up pulling the ad, but of course by that time the damage had been done and, like it or not, we’d advertised Sunkist. To add insult to injury, we never got paid for it. Not a cent. It’s still up on YouTube, check it out.
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There's only two choices when life goes wrong. You deal with it, or you check out, and, like 90% of people, I go for the former.
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Now, this meeting would have taken place in mid-to-late 2004, over two years after we started recording, and a lot happened between that summit and the album coming out. One of them was that terrible tsunami in Indonesia on Boxing Day. Because of that, the record company got cold feet on Barney’s cover image, fearing a possible media backlash, and Alan Parkes from Warners had to go to Pete’s studio, pleading with him to do another sleeve. Pete was insistent. ‘No, I don’t want to do one. I don’t want to do it,’ but Alan was just as persistent, until at last Pete got fed up and wrote ‘NO’ on a piece of paper, gave it to Alan and said, ‘There’s my answer,’ and Alan went, ‘That’ll do,’ and took it. I like it. I think it’s one of his best sleeves.
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I watched John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers play it acoustically at their gig at the MEN Arena. I think I can safely say that, of the 19,000 people there, 18,950 didn’t know what it was—but I did, and it brought a tear to my eye, definitely. Monster bass line. A bass line that every bass player dreams of and I got it, so thank you.
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We played at a festival in Mexico City, at the same time as another famous artist, and I reckon we had 55,000 people watching New Order; the other had 7,000. I think from that I've discovered the secret of success in the music industry: don't do any promotion.
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America stopped making vinyl and phased out the single but Germany held out and refused. Warner's never phased out vinyl in Germany. Now America imports it!
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It’s called sticking your head in the sand, and because I did that I lost millions of quid and still don’t have financial security now, even after forty years of being in the music business, the co-writer of ‘Blue Monday’ and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and many successful albums. At the end of the day I’ve only got myself to blame for said actions and for never raising my voice against signing daft agreement after daft agreement, that signed away 30 per cent of my earnings in perpetuity and all my rights to publishing and song royalties to erroneous partnerships and companies I have absolutely no control over. It’s unbelievable to me now.
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I see all the musicians in Blur with equal standing, really.
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A career is forward planning.
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Bernard insisted on having ‘just one more go’, and in doing so used up mine and Steve’s tracks, wiping them, so by the time Martin finally threw up his hands and told us to fuck off, Barney’s was the only vocal left on tape. Which is pretty much how he became our singer.
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When digital recording came in about '84, everything started to follow into digital. Now, you've got the best recording media in the world, but it's not very pleasing to the ear.
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'Blue Monday' is a dance track with a hint of melancholy.
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Rob fought this so hard. He hired a musicologist in England to analyse the song. It turns out that musicologists use a scale of twelve notes and if eight of those notes are present in both songs, then the accused, us, is deemed guilty. Which we were. Rob wouldn’t have it, so he then got an American musicologist to analyse it. He said the same. We lost again. John Denver got his per cent cut and a writer’s credit. Warners wanted to take it off the album on any subsequent pressings, but we said no. I still don’t hear it now. Denver died in 1997, shortly after it was eventually settled. God, imagine if we did that with all the tunes that sound like us? We’d make a fortune. Humh . . . there’s a thought.
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There's no future for New Order.
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“Atmosphere" is a massive song. A lot of people say it's their favorite Joy Division song, but it's not mine; it reminds me too much of Ian, like it's his death march or something, and it figures that it's one of the most popular songs to play at funerals: Robbie Williams has got "Angels" for weddings and we've got "Atmosphere" for funerals.
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Nobody is the same. If we were all the same it would be bloody boring.
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This really was the start of a period where me, Barney and Steve would all be meeting bands and getting into producing them. Barney did Section 25, Happy Mondays. Steve and Gillian produced Thick Pigeon (who, incidentally, were Stanton Miranda, Michael Shamberg’s girlfriend, and Carter Burwell, who later made his name scoring films for the Coen Brothers).