Mad World

by Lori Majewski

  “Blue Monday” was meant to be an instrumental closer to the show. In the studio we just thought we’d have a go at putting lyrics over it. The lyrics and the vocal were the absolute last things that went on. They were done at four o’clock in the morning, right at the end, when the song was written and nearly produced. The lyrics were very much an afterthought, and I think the reluctance to put them on can be heard. But strangely enough, it works. The deadpan, off-beat delivery actually works great as a contrast with the music: How. Does it. Feel. It’s such a juxtaposition, isn’t it?

  With Ian gone, we all tried to be New Order’s singer. Our producer, Martin Hannett, hated us all—Bernard just had the last go. But realistically, with Bernard adding the guitar after he sang, it managed to give you a new style. So he would sing, Steve and I would play, then, when he’d stop singing, he would play guitar. And that gave it the lift, the up and down, the light and dark, that became the New Order sound.

  “Blue Monday” was recorded in conjunction with about 10 other songs: “Temptation,” “Everything’s Gone Green,” “Thieves like Us.”… It was competing with many other songs in our hearts, if you like. It was nearly seven and a half minutes long, and we were asked to cut it down, but we just didn’t do it. However, we did agree to do a shortened version for Top of the Pops. Top of the Pops was what you watched as a child, and it was one of the only music programs that was on mainstream TV. Everything was about Top of the Pops—it was a religious ceremony. Even though you didn’t like the acts on Top of the Pops most of the time, you still watched it. It was the only TV program that you could guarantee would annoy your parents, and it would educate you as to what was going on musically. So to get our act on it was an honor, and [editing the song] was something we accommodated for that reason. If you played on Top of the Pops, supposedly your single went up 15 places, guaranteed. Because we played live—we didn’t mime—and sounded terrible and looked terrible, ours was the only record that went down. We were delighted about that, though. It was punk; it was chaotic; it was wild; it cocked a snoot, as we say in England. We were happy—even when the record went down the charts, we were happy.

  I got the title “Blue Monday” from a book. Everybody thinks it’s from the Fats Domino song, but it wasn’t. It came from a fiction book. I would read voraciously in the studio. There was a sheet on the wall, and everybody would write ideas on it. Power, Corruption and Lies came from the back of 1984. “True Faith” came from a James A. Michener book on Texan Catholicism. The titles had very little to do with the songs. It was tradition, something we carried on, and a mark of excellence that we got from Joy Division. “Atmosphere,” “The Eternal”—these words were never mentioned in the songs either.

  MIXTAPE: 5 More Dark, Depressing, Doom-Filled Dance-Floor Classics 1. “Dr. Mabuse,” Propaganda 2. “I Travel,” Simple Minds 3. “Der Mussolini,” D.A.F. 4. “Sensoria,” Cabaret Voltaire 5. “Living in Oblivion,” Anything Box

  It was me and Bernard who wrote the melodies. There’s long been a personality conflict there. We certainly were not friendly, shall we say. I think Bernard ever only phoned me once. The only time was to ask for a lift to rehearsals because his car battery was dead. And I must admit, I’ve never phoned him.

  It’s also ego. It was always me and him fighting for the limelight, not only on stage but musically. To me, New Order wasn’t New Order unless it had the bass guitar on it, and he would go to great lengths to try and mix me out. He started trying to get me out of the music a long, long time ago. If you listen, you can hear the bass getting quieter and quieter in the songs as the struggle evolved between Bernard and me. If you look at songs like “Thieves like Us” and “Blue Monday,” the bass is as loud as the vocal. Further on, the bass is not as loud as the vocal; it’s disappearing. The notable one was “Bizarre Love Triangle.” That was the first stand-up fight we had about how much bass was in the song. Bernard felt that the bass dated it. And actually, it’s the other way around now, isn’t it? You hear the bass, and it gives it a timeless quality.

  We went to do “Here to Stay” with the Chemical Brothers, who were great fans of the group. The way I normally work is this: I put bass through the whole track, and then we leave it to the producer to pick the parts. Well, when we went to listen to what they’d done, Bernard and I sat there and listened with the Chemical Brothers—and they had put every bass part in throughout the whole song. Because they loved it. Bernard went fucking mad! He told me the bass was interfering with the lead vocal. It was at that point that I thought, Oh my God, this band is finished. It’s only time before it goes. He got his own way, like he always did.

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS IS NOW

  New Order’s original lineup—which also included Morris’s wife, keyboardist Gillian Gilbert—continued until 2007, when a frustrated Hook announced he was quitting. Sumner and Morris soldiered on without Hook and Gilbert, who’d departed to be a full-time mother. But then Sumner and Morris decided to form a new group, Bad Lieutenant. Despite Morris’s declaration that “there’s no future for New Order,” 2011 saw a re-formation with Gilbert but not Hook. The bassist responded with a lawsuit accusing the others of touring and planning to record as New Order without compensating him. Then, in 2013, New Order released the long-delayed album The Last Sirens, the final tracks recorded while Hook was still a member. Meanwhile, Hook tours the world with his band the Light, playing Joy Division and New Order albums in their entirety. Talk about confusion!

  SUMNER: We knew “Blue Monday” was a good song, but we didn’t realize just how potent it was. You’re too close to the trees. Go on YouTube and type in “the Jolly Boys, Blue Monday.” It’s two or three 80-year-old guys doing this weird, Jamaican-music version. It’s fantastic.

  We just played Mexico, and we had 50,000 people. Sometimes you get really young fans. I’ve spoken to some of them and said, “How have you heard about New Order?” This girl at the airport the other day must have been, like, 16. And they go, “Oh, my sister played it to me” or “My father played it to me.” It’s passed down through the family like a gold watch.

  We’d been trying to get The Lost Sirens out for a long time but that’s when we had the falling-out with Peter Hook, and he refused to take part in it. He refused to come to the writing sessions and was busy DJing. So we never finished those songs.

  HOOK: One of the main problems toward the end of my time with New Order—not New Odor, as they are now—was that Bernard was managing the band, and if anyone upset him, they were in trouble. He became like a dictator. There’s an interview with Bernard where he said that one of the problems with New Order was he wasn’t allowed to change the chemistry of it, and that was absolutely correct. The chemistry of it was that I played bass on every track. You’re not messing with that. You want to mess with that, go form another band. And that was exactly what he did. They now have a bass player that they can tell what to do, whereas before they had a bass player they could not tell what to do and who did what he wanted. That’s what made the band fiery and interesting.

  If we had sorted it out before New Order had re-formed, I could have wished them the best, could’ve wished them well. But because of the way they did it, I could never wish them well. What makes me laugh is when journalists take great delight in asking, “Do you think you’ll ever get back with them?” Because of the group that I loved and put 32 years into, I’m fighting them tooth and nail. This is a divorce. You know when you’re going through the arguments, the splitting of the CDs, who’s getting half the dog, and things like that? For someone to ask me if I’m going to get back with them, it does seem strangely ridiculous at this point in time. But in the future you would hope that you and your ex would get on well, if just for the kids. I hope that we can get on well because our fans, who are our kids, would love it if we did. At the moment, we aren’t.

  I watched the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and heard “Blue Monday.” It was fantastic, it really was. To be put
into that context, part of a country’s musical history, that was a fantastic compliment. What makes these arguments that New Order have between us quite stupid is the largeness of the thing we’ve created. To my mind, you’re ruining it with the petty squabbles that you’re having now, which are very, very sad.

  If you read [Charlatans’ singer] Tim Burgess’s book, Telling Stories, he spends the whole time, the rest of his career, looking for the dead keyboard player. In a way, both Bernard and I may be looking for someone to replace Ian Curtis. If somebody of that stature came in, then maybe we would have stopped fighting. It’s just that it never happened, did it?

  “I watched the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and heard ‘Blue Monday.’ … To be put into that context, part of a country’s musical history, that was a fantastic compliment.”

  “POISON ARROW”

  In 1979, Sheffield was the home of Britain’s steel industry. It was also the birthplace of oppressive experimental underground acts like Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA, and the early, avant-garde, all-male Human League. Martin Fry, a worker in a baked beans factory by day and fanzine writer by night, went to interview another Sheffield industrial group, Vice Versa, and ended up joining their ranks. Dissatisfied with the music they were making, Fry and new bandmates Mark White and Steve Singleton changed the name of their group to ABC and made it their mission to write songs as slick and polished as their previous output had been clanging and thudding. They were not alone in their ambitions: The streets of the U.K. bustled with bands more than happy to trade their indie credibility for glossy productions and chart success (see Scritti Politti, the Associates, Thompson Twins). But with their first international hit, “Poison Arrow,” and their debut album, The Lexicon of Love, ABC left their contemporaries twisting in the wind. Lexicon was a rich, overstuffed chocolate box of a record. Fry’s extravagant wordplay was perfectly complemented by Trevor Horn’s opulent, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink production and his regular arranger Anne Dudley’s lush orchestration. The Lexicon of Love was the sound of a band reaching out to achieve their ambitions, and surpassing them. Expecting them to ever best such a spectacular debut would have been asking the impossible, but at the height of their powers, ABC appeared so unassailable that asking the impossible seemed appropriate.

  JB: I had ABC’s number. Without hearing a note, I knew what they were: another new group who had put in hours practicing moody looks for their glossy spread in the Face. Another new group with a loquacious egomaniac frontman who had put in hours practicing self-aggrandizing quotes for his feature in the NME. Another new group who specialized in the sort of arthritic British funk that had reached pandemic status since Spandau Ballet drew up the blueprint with “Chant No. 1.” ABC’s first single, “Tears Are Not Enough,” did little to alter my sullen adolescent prejudices. Singer Martin Fry proved, as predicted, considerably more accomplished at posing for artfully constructed photographs and hailing his band’s greatness in the pop press than he was convincing as the soulful singer of a band who claimed global success as a birthright. Then they released “Poison Arrow.” Everything, you, as a young person, might hope you’re going to get in a pop record is right there. Emotion, ambition, humor, drama. A point of view. A sense of the ridiculous. A call-and-response bridge. Even a talky bit in the middle. The Julien Temple–directed music video was every bit the record’s melodramatic equal, with a lovelorn Fry tormented and cheerfully abused by luscious femme fatale (and future Real Housewife of Beverly Hills) Lisa Vanderpump. I have gone on to be completely wrong about many other groups—and, indeed, many other aspects of life, in general—but initially dismissing ABC was the most rewarding mistake I ever made.

  LM: Not sure if you realize it, JB, but The Lexicon of Love is the reason we became friends. When you told me it was your favorite album of all time—back in the early nineties, when we were the only people who’d admit to liking new wave while working at a grunge-obsessed Spin magazine—I thought: Now, here’s a guy I can hang with. While I love Spandau and Culture Club, neither ever released a flawless long-player like Lexicon. The talky bits were my favorite parts, like in “The Look of Love,” when Fry says to himself, “Martin, maybe one day you’ll find true love.” He always came across as such a hopeless romantic—it was the beautifully tailored suits, the way he referenced Cupid and Smokey Robinson in his songs, how he pined for a more chivalrous era. For an eighties teenager experiencing the thrill (and then heartache) of her first crush, ABC offered a vision of love that I could only hope the real thing would live up to.

  MARTIN FRY: Decades don’t always begin at zero. They begin a couple of years in, the mood and style. A couple of years into the eighties, when I was forming ABC, I realized no one could be more Sex Pistol–y than the Sex Pistols or more Clash than the Clash. I loved punk, but it never seemed to go as far as it could have. Maybe Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes or Tony Hadley and Gary Kemp might say something different, but for me and for a lot of my generation, it was really frustrating the Clash were never on Top of the Pops. I wasn’t going to try and be a proto-punk. I wanted to do the opposite.

  That’s why I got so excited by disco, which was a really dirty word at the time. I wanted to make music that was funky and radical. The early ABC was the “Radical Dance Faction”—that’s what we called ourselves. I’d also grown up loving Motown, Stax, and Atlantic, along with Roxy Music—Roxy performing “Virginia Plain” on Top of the Pops in 1972 was my road to Damascus. So it made natural sense to try and fuse those worlds. When I think back, looking at stuff like the Pop Group, James Chance and the Contortions, Pigbag, and all the bands that came through just before and just after ABC—Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode—there was a whole generation itching to make dance music, populist music. I don’t think it was any accident that all those bands became internationally known.

  I interviewed Vice Versa for my fanzine, Modern Drugs, in 1979. They were kind of a fledgling Human League, only younger and less revered. When I went to interview Steve Singleton and Mark White, they said, “We’re going on a train from Sheffield to Middlesbrough to open up for Cowboys International. We’ve not got a drummer, but we’ve got lots of synths in our holdalls. You can stand onstage with us.” We got bottled off by these skinheads who didn’t get us. We were mohair sweaters and post-punk and ironic, but I loved it. After that, they let me join the band.

  MIXTAPE: 5 More Melodramatic Songs About Heartbreak 1. “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,” Soft Cell 2. “Waves,” Blancmange 3. “No More ‘I Love You’s,’” The Lover Speaks 4. “The Promise,” When in Rome 5. “The Promise You Made,” Cock Robin

  Sheffield was full of experimental bands: Cabaret Voltaire, Human League splitting off into Heaven 17, Pulp were on that circuit, Comsat Angels. You felt really isolated in Sheffield. You didn’t feel linked to the rest of the country. People didn’t really go there for any reason. So the majority of the audiences you played to were musicians, guys in other bands. Those are the toughest people to play to. We once did a gig in the Heaven and Hell club in Birmingham. If you took out the 5 members of Duran Duran* who came to see the show, there’d be about 24 other people there. But Sheffield was entirely subsidized, so you could get on a bus for 10p and go anywhere in the city. It was a great place to be poverty stricken and function. That’s why the band was able to change and develop.

  Mike Pickering, who went on to be the DJ at the Haçienda, was working as a chef in Rotterdam and said he could get us some gigs there. So we went and slept on his floor. He had a shop and threw a party and let us jam. I started singing, and Mark White said I should be Vice Versa’s singer. But then Mark White was dogmatic that we should drop everything, change the name, and become something else. It was destroy, disorder, disorientate—smash it all up. Vice Versa were being played on John Peel, they’d done an EP, they were going places, but we decided to destroy it. Virtually overnight, we hooked up with a drummer, bass player, sax, and keys. Looking back, it was really ambitious. We had a v
ision of how we wanted to be. We showed up onstage in Sheffield wearing cyclists’ uniforms. People would show up expecting Vice Versa, and we were this new band, ABC: the Radical Dance Faction. Overnight, we wanted to be a funk band but with a sort of angular lyric. We wanted to be as polished as Chic and Earth, Wind & Fire, a band that was nurtured on Diamond Dogs and Kool and the Gang. We didn’t really have the musicality, but that’s not something you think about when you’re coming through. That’s why they call it blind ambition.

  It was a frantic time, 1980, ’81. We always felt like we wanted to get there first. The Human League were an incredible band, but we’d seen how Gary Numan and Orchestral Manoeuvres had almost eclipsed them by having chart hits. Spandau Ballet and A Certain Ratio terrified us. Stimulin, Funkapolitan, Haircut 100—you’d hear about these bands on the grapevine and through fanzines and the NME and Record Mirror. They were all unsigned. We were frantically writing songs and playing shows. We wanted to be a step ahead. It felt like we were running to a place we wanted to be. I look back, and it was like a mania. Everybody had their manifesto, and everybody had a big mouth back then. I used to do interviews and tell people we were going to conquer the world. It all boils down to wish fulfillment, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s why Muhammad Ali did it: to try and psych himself up for the battle ahead. It was mildly irritating when Gary Kemp said Spandau Ballet were the best band in the world or when Simon Le Bon said the same thing about Duran Duran. But we all said it.