New Order Quotes
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There was a lot of downtime sitting by Mike, so I read. I had a little table on which I had my pile of books and, by the end, they were nearly as high as the studio ceiling. I used to get all the song titles from them. Even the album titles, as it turned out, because ‘A startling tale of power, corruption and lies’ was a review quote from the Daily Telegraph on the back of 1984 by George Orwell. ‘Leave Me Alone’ came from Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and ‘Ultraviolence’ was from A Clockwork Orange, to name but a few.
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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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Sarcasm is a Manchester trait.
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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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It is true that the record company are always thinking of new ways to flog New Order to people.
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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.
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I'm terrible with decisions. And I can't make myself do something I don't like. I can't knuckle under.
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I didn't want children until my late thirties because my career was taking off, and I was having such a good time in New Order. But when you have children, you have to make decisions; I always wanted to stay at home with my kids.
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Adidas produced a limited-edition pair of Haçienda trainers, designed by Yohji Yamamoto (Saville has worked with Yohji since the late 1980s, creating his catalogues and advertisements). They retailed for £345 but people queued up from midnight just to be first through the doors to buy a pair. The shoes disappeared in twenty minutes - all soled out.
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I just sat on the bed and cried. I couldn't go to sleep. I was just sitting there thinking 'This poor guy,'
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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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If someone throws you in a pool and you can't swim, you're going to struggle.
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Decisions are going to have to be made before we know about the state money.
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Like the time I threw out Pete Murphy of Bauhaus for saying those six immortal words to Slim when he'd forgotten his backstage pass: 'Don't you know who I am?
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You can never tell with New Order. Just when you think the band is coming to an end, it takes off again.
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If I work on music, it'll be for 10 hours a day, so sometimes I'll feel stressed, and I'll go for a two-hour walk. That sorts me out.
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There's nothing wrong with wanting to be in a disco band.
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Then came a rather surreal exchange about Joy Division T-shirts, with us proudly proclaiming we did not sell merchandise because we didn’t believe in self-promotion of any kind, preferring to let the music speak for itself. ‘Rubbish,’ boomed Scotty. ‘How come wherever I go I see Joy Division and New Order T-shirts, worn and for sale, eh?’ Now, we had no idea where he was going to see these things, but we were all speechless anyway. He continued, ‘I don’t believe you, and will be fining you accordingly.’ So we would get fined £10,000 for not doing our own T-shirts.
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When you get in a band, you never consider the day it'll all just stop.
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I was a fan when Cracker was last on TV so it's great to be doing the music for the new series.
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When I joined New Order, I was made to feel equal to everyone else in the band so I didn't feel like an outsider. I was treated equally, I was paid equally, and my opinion was sought after.
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We don't to be some kind of rock supergroup for the sake of being a supergroup. You want to change things and say something fresh and new so you appeal to people as a new group.
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I suppose in the end it's almost too easy to look back and say what you should have done, how you might have changed things. What's harder - what's much, much harder - is to accept what you actually did do.
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The fact is that you don't want to be away forever, but you want to lead a normal life.