New Order Quotes
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I remember driving there in the afternoon, and I remember getting there and loading the gear in. I don’t remember the sound check. We had one, I think, but we had no idea what to do because we’d never done one before. No one had the foggiest. Not knowing what to do made it exciting, though. Like, now, everybody’s got a stage manager and a sound guy, lights, and so on. The bands know all about sound checks and levels, equipment and all that. Now they even have music schools to teach you that kind of stuff. Back then you knew fuck-all. You didn’t have anyone professional, just your mates, who, like you, were clueless; you had a disco PA and a sleepy barmaid. It’s something I find quite sad about groups today, funnily enough, the careerism of it all. I saw this program once, a “battle of the bands” sort of thing. It had Alex James from Blur on it and Lauren Laverne and some twat from a record company, and they’d sit there saying what they thought of the band: “Your bass player’s shit and your image needs work; lose the harmonica player.” All the bands just stood there and took it, going, “Cheers, man, we’ll go off and do that.” I couldn’t believe it. I joined a band to tell everyone to fuck off, and if somebody said to me, “Your image is shit,” I’d have gone, “Fuck off, knob head!” And if someone had said, “Your music’s shit,” I would have nutted them. That to me is what’s lacking in groups. They’ve missed out that growing-up stage of being bloody-minded and fucking clueless. You have to have ultimate self-belief. You have to believe right from the word go that you’re great and that the rest of the world has to catch up with you. Of us lot, Ian was the best at that. He believed in Joy Division completely. If any of us got downhearted it was always him who would cheer us up and get us going again. He’d put you back on track.
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If someone throws you in a pool and you can't swim, you're going to struggle.
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Nobody is the same. If we were all the same it would be bloody boring.
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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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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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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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'Blue Monday' is a dance track with a hint of melancholy.
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I see all the musicians in Blur with equal standing, really.
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If you choose to take a path in life, don't blame other people for the path you've chosen to take.
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Before you go thinking I’m some kind of King Canute – it was my stance against programmed music that made our sound the way it was (even if I do say so myself), keeping it a hybrid of rock and dance: the sound of the future. Instead I decided to bury myself in the recording process, becoming the band’s recording engineer.
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When Joy Division started, I was scared to death of having to get a normal day job.
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There's no future for New Order.
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You reply to a fan, you get a fan for life, Rob would say. I should put that in my rules for a group, really.
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Joy Division finished the 1970s on a high. Our debut album, 'Unknown Pleasures,' was doing well; we'd just finished a hugely enjoyable and successful tour. The band's profile was higher than it had ever been, and it seemed to be growing by the day.
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Los Angeles produced the Beach Boys. Dusseldorf produced Kraftwerk. New York produced Chic. Manchester produced Joy Division.
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I suppose it was karma that Substance would then turn out to be our biggest-selling album ever; we gave away our biggest-selling record to the record company at a reduced cost – for no reason other than they couldn’t pay us for the other ones at the full rate because of bad management.
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There's a tendency when you write a book to portray yourself as the hero.
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When you get in a band, you never consider the day it'll all just stop.
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We were like, ‘Hey, what are you doing!?’ but soon twigged they were trying to give us a proper Japanese welcome by carrying our bags for us. Great. This was the life. Then we looked round and saw Gillian still struggling with hers. Turns out that in this culture they don’t help a woman. We got her a trolley.
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We had wanted to use a final sample to finish the twelve-inch track off, “That’s All Folks!” from the Warner Brothers cartoons. But we were quoted $30,000 for one use. And we were on their label. Just shows you . . . no favouritism.
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Nobody sells records any more, and the only way you can actually do anything is to go out and play live.
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Movement came out while we were away. The reviews were OK, and though I grew to like it more and more as the years went by, we weren’t especially happy with it at the time. When we listened to the finished product what we heard was the sound of a band whose producer had lost faith. You could hear it. The album had ended up sounding like a Joy Division album with New Order vocals.
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I think people expect mud at festivals, I think you'd be asking for your money back if you didn't get it.
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It was only after we recorded Unknown Pleasures that I could hear and begin to take notice of the words, and it was quite startling then to see how they changed between that album, where they were still quite detached and aggressive, to Closer, which is even darker and not detached at all but really introspective and quite frightening—especially of course when you listen to it in light of what later happened.