‘Still a bit political.’
‘Bit of a mouthful, isn’t it?’
‘All right, “The New Order” then?’
‘“The New Order” is not bad.’
Somebody didn’t like the ‘The’, so that got dropped and we ended up adopting the completely neutral-sounding name of ‘New Order’. A name with absolutely no Nazi connotations whatsoever . . .
‘Wasn’t Pol Pot a Communist anyway?’ asked Hooky.
I piped up with, ‘Wasn’t “The New Order” a MC5/Stooges splinter band?’
‘Don’t know, but Ian would’ve liked that anyway.’
That settled it.
We were now New Order.
27
NEW YORK NEW YORK
We kept the last two songs we’d written with Ian. ‘Ceremony’, which (in my opinion) had hit single pressed though it like Blackpool rock, was probably the only Joy Division song that I played repeatedly on cassette; I liked it that much. It was somehow uplifting and well . . . up. And ‘In a Lonely Place’, the title of which came from a film poster pillaged from the Kant Kino gig in Berlin. It served as wallpaper at our rehearsal room. The large posters listed forthcoming attractions and became our main source of song titles (‘Cries and Whispers’ was another). ‘In a Lonely Place’ is an extremely dark song, as far from up as it’s possible to get. Talk about chalk and cheese.
Still in summer of 1980 these emotionally polar opposite songs were our entire repertoire. They had the two essential ingredients – words and music.
We had problems with words.
We didn’t have any.
We had none of Ian’s lyric books. So in order to work out what exactly the words to ‘Ceremony’ and ‘In a Lonely Place’ were, we booked a day in a studio to try and decipher them from what tapes we had. It was grim. The closest thing I could imagine to a sonic autopsy. Listening to Ian’s words so closely was like reading a suicide note over and over again. Rob wrote down our interpretations of the lyrics. We tried to laugh.
‘Christ, he was a bit depressed, wasn’t he?’
‘No wonder he topped himself.’
There wasn’t much to smile about really.
The first actual New Order song we wrote, if memory serves, was ‘Dreams Never End’, which Hooky wrote the lyrics for and sang. Shortly followed by ‘Truth’: an exercise in how to programme the newly acquired drum machine with me playing keyboards. I wasn’t especially fazed or bothered by this. At the time it made sense. Someone had to play the keyboard and someone had to sing. None of us could do the two things simultaneously. If we were going to change and get anywhere there was little point in being precious about swapping instruments; something that had occasionally happened in Joy Division.
The main thing that changed was we began to write songs that worked as instrumentals, in the hope that if we stuck some lyrics over the top they’d sound even better. As opposed to the words and music happening simultaneously, which had usually been the case in Joy Division. Bernard would write and arrange the musical parts, then would come the hard part of writing words that would fit over the music. What the hell did you write a song about? I had no idea, so the bits that I came up with sounded a bit like something Ian might have written on a spectacularly off day. It would take quite a while before we realised that it might make things easier if we changed the music to accommodate the words.
Various bands that we’d played with in the past had used a reel-to-reel tape machine live. And on the basis that if it worked for them it’d work for us, we opted to use the tape machine instead of the shiny new drum machine as an extra pair of hands. We hired a 16-channel mixing desk that none of us knew how to operate and set about making backing tracks for a couple of songs as an experiment. (Working late into the night at Pinkie’s, we disturbed the rodent population with our labours. Bernard was the first to jump up on a chair for safety.) We recorded the drum machine for ‘Truth’, thinking it would be more reliable than the drum machine itself and recorded the real drums for ‘In a Lonely Place’ for reasons that don’t make any sense now. But it must have done then. Perhaps I had drawn the short straw and was supposed to be singing? Or most likely keyboard playing? This all worked fine and dandy in the rehearsal room. These things always do.
Then a last-minute gig presented itself. I could be wrong but there wasn’t a lot of notice, perhaps a day or more likely an afternoon. Our first live outing would be at the Beach Club upstairs at Oozits behind the Arndale. That this would be a low-key affair was some sort of encouragement: we weren’t billed and would be first on the bill supporting Action Holiday and our friends A Certain Ratio.
Bernard’s intro patter was: ‘Hello, we’re the last surviving members of Crawling Chaos.’
Things were all right – for a first-ever gig in the nervous, jittery way that most debuts tend to be – until the tape machine was called for (a foretaste of what was to come in later years). I was in charge of the tape’s operation, another short straw or more than likely I foolishly volunteered myself. So the thing was precariously balanced next to the drum kit.
‘Truth’ was fine but things went very wrong with the tape machine on ‘In a Lonely Place’, which meant wheeling out the tried-and-tested fall back of jamming ‘Sister Ray’ until things sorted themselves out. It could have been a lot worse.
Looking back at it now, besides the obvious vocal struggle, it was the drum machine’s appearance (hidden by tape at the Beach Club) that passed unnoticed and uncommented on. Maybe it was a fad of the time and every band was starting to use one, but I doubt it. It had never been there with Ian (all Joy Division’s synthetic rhythms were handmade, well live at least they were). But there it was at the very first New Order gigs, confidently chattering and pinging away, just quietly biding its time. The Doctor Rhythm was in.
My Favourite audience comment of the night was: ‘This lot are just ripping off Joy Division.’
The reel-to-reel was retired from gigging and we went back to the drawing board for any future live appearances before the paying public. In retrospect it seems unbelievable that Ian had been dead for only eight weeks. Only two months. At the time it felt a great deal longer than that.
If you’re going to make mistakes and learn on the job it’s probably a good idea to do it somewhere where nobody knows you. Less embarrassing all round that way. Somewhere like the USA, for example. Another bit of symmetry or unfinished business perhaps. Why not start off in the place where Joy Division left off ? Kind of . . .
Another whinging Morris postcard.
It was late when we arrived in New York. Tony, Martin and A Certain Ratio, who we were supporting, were there already. They’d come over a few days earlier to do some dates on their own and a bit of recording with Martin. ACR were staying in a loft somewhere downtown or was it up?
The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down was how Sinatra explained it, though that meant nothing now. Three lads on shore leave. What was the Battery anyway?
The airline had lost my bag, it’d taken so long to get there that I didn’t care. It’ll sort itself out tomorrow. So luggage-less and basking in the novelty of jet lag I lay in the four-bed room I was sharing with Terry, Twinny and Dave at the Iroquois on W 44th St., listening to the sirens of the NYPD cops chasing bad guys down the city’s steaming mean streets.
The Iroquois was described as a ‘funky’ hotel. Very popular with visiting British bands. Fixer of all things, Ruth Polsky, our American promoter and soon to be best friend and guide, assured us that it was the number one place in town in our price range. Being a local Ruth seemed to know what she was talking about, but I had to admit that the Algonquin next door looked much more refined.
The Algonquin, of course, was not our sort of place. A year or so later we would find out how much ‘not our sort of place’ it was, when we had to fight our way out of the Algonquin bar (favoured watering hole of celebrated critic and wit Dorothy Parker, who might have enjoyed the punch-up).
The bar at the Iroquois ha
d the Algonquin beat hands down. The barman was not averse to tuning the TV to a local cable channel that specialised in showing topless shows when things got a bit quiet. NYC in the early 1980s was awash with sleaze of all varieties, Times Square being sleaze central. Street hustlers crowded the pavements, trying to lure the stupid into games of Find the Lady or Three-card Monte. The stores were almost entirely porn-based. From XXX live peep shows to nudge-nudge-wink-wink adult photographic supplies, there was everything you could think off and quite a lot you didn’t think was even possible. It was all there. Definitely an eye-opener; it made London’s Soho look like a village fête. On one corner Gene Palma, the slicked-back street drummer from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, was still demonstrating Gene Krupa’s syncopated style on his snare drum. It was somewhere near Times Square that Twinny, on a wide-eyed-lads-sight-seeing tour, discovered ‘poppers’ (amyl nitrite), ready and cheaply available in every sex emporium. An instant hit with the band.
‘Just smell this, Steve, it’ll make your head turn red.’
He wasn’t kidding. In seconds I felt myself turning into a living Belisha beacon. The aroma took me back to the dry-cleaning-fluidsniffing sessions of my chemically experimental school days but the buzziness seemed less malevolent.
We’d come over for some gigs to support A Certain Ratio as well as to go into the studio with Martin to record ‘Ceremony’ and ‘In a Lonely Place’. To be honest this didn’t feel entirely like the start of something new. More like continuing a journey after you’ve fixed a puncture or a busted fan belt. There’s still the sneaking feeling that the repairs you’ve made may not hold up. But no one admits to worrying about that.
Rob and I were more worried about where we were going to get some dope. (Martin and Tony had already sorted themselves out.) How do you go about scoring drugs when everyone has a gun?
New York in the ’80s was a much more interesting place than it is today. It was statistically a dangerous place, although it didn’t feel like it. I, typically, fretted about scoring dope more than how the gigs were going to go; more than who was doing the singing and what words we would be mumbling. Playing the gigs was a thing that’d sort itself out later after we’d got shit-faced. Dutch courage.
We went out to Hurrah, the club Ruth managed on W. 62nd St. Suicide were on that night. Joy Division had played with them at the Factory on one occasion. I remember Martin Rev being a bit bewildered with Manchester nightlife. This time it was my turn to feel alien. While waiting for Ruth to sort out getting us into the club, I watched a guy getting kicked (literally) out of the club by a couple of burly guys and booted halfway down the street like a human football. That didn’t happen in Macclesfield. Well, not often.
Once in, Hurrah was nowhere near as heavy as I was expecting. A bank of TVs playing videos (cartoons mostly), a healthy queue around the Space Invaders machine (my kind of people), good music, beer that didn’t get you pissed and a great atmosphere. It had an energy that many UK clubs didn’t have. I felt comfortable and for me that’s saying something. Almost at home. Ruth managed to fix me and Rob up with some grass, which we sampled in one of the back rooms. The locals couldn’t understand why we wanted to roll up the stuff with tobacco; they preferred their marijuana unadulterated. We tried it their way. Before long we were laughing like giddy horses.
‘Now how do we get home?’
‘I don’t think I can walk.’
Dazzled by the club and the discovery that the tickets Ruth had handed out could be exchanged for FREE DRINKS, we naturally overindulged. Finally weed blurry, jet-lagged and paranoid, we piled into a yellow cab that bounced us all the way home.
When I imagined America, I always had an image of wide-open spaces, a never-ending road trip in a massive streamlined Cadillac or Stutz. Something with plenty of chrome. The American car was king and we were all born to run. Driving bumper to bumper down 6th, overusing the horn was something to look forward to. An experience to savour like smoking a Camel while eating a hot dog. I thought with all the driving that I had done I would take to the roads of New York with some sort of relish or, failing that, competence. Sadly my motoring mojo seemed to have disappeared along with my suitcase. Possibly impounded by US customs. Overexposure to American crime dramas was most likely to blame. The climax to these epic battles of kind-hearted cops verses cold-hearted, gun-toting villains invariably took the form of a dramatic high-speed car chase culminating in a blazing warehouse shootout. Death by firearm or dangerous driving were always key factors. Obviously the reality would be slightly different. I mean, come on, that’s all made-up stuff. Things like that don’t actually happen in real life, do they?
The reality of the place was not far removed from the idea I’d conjured up from watching too much TV and listening to White Light/White Heat.
We all hopped in a cab to collect a hire car from a garage somewhere uptown. The garage looked uncannily like the one in the TV show Taxi, only without the yellow cabs. I took the beige bit of cardboard that the man from the AA had assured me was an international driving licence essential for the visiting motorist and valid anywhere in the world. The proprietor of the garage had never seen one before. To him it looked very much like a piece of beige cardboard.
‘What’s this, buster?’
I’d paid good money for that cardboard.
A typical bit of New York negotiating later and the garage proprietor reluctantly agreed, on presentation of Bernard’s provisional licence, to let us hire a car. A huge well-worn, duck-egg blue Ford station wagon. I’d never driven a car with automatic transmission before. That and the fact the steering wheel was in the wrong place added to my sense of disorientation.
Automatics were simple, I’d been told. No clutch, just two pedals (left one for stop and right one for go) just like a dodgem. This vehicle exhibited some very strange behaviour, especially when it came to stopping or more accurately not stopping. This, I guessed, was some quirk of the marque. I would press what appeared to be the brake pedal almost to the floor and the blue metal behemoth would show no signs of slowing or even thinking about coming to a halt. Maybe it was just me? When I pressed a bit harder, the thing juddered and eventually began to slow down. Still, I was convinced I was doing something wrong, but I’d no idea what it might be. Maybe there was some special knack to driving automatic cars that I didn’t possess? This is when panic began to set in. It was as if the car had a mind of its own. I managed to get the wallowing leviathan down the ramp, out of the garage and around the corner without hitting anything. With an extended blast of horn, a loud screech and a crunch of metal, two cars now collided directly in front of me.
‘Hey asshole, you blind or something?’
‘You coulda killed someone.’
For me this was not going well. Shaken and not a little surprised that I had managed to stop the car at all, I become overwhelmed with a completely irrational but extremely intense anxiety. This came to its peak when I realised that we had just come to a stop outside the city morgue, just as a black-clad fresh cadaver was being wheeled out.
Talk about ill omens.
‘Eeegh Steve, look at that, a stiff in a bag,’ Bernard pointed out less than helpfully.
Maybe it was the aftereffects of last night’s wacky-baccy indulgence combined with seeing my first ever dead American that did it, but that was enough for me. I suffered a death-traffic-related-mininervous-breakdown and fled the car shrieking.
My dreams of driving a speeding muscle car down the canyons of Manhattan came to an abrupt end, in a wimpy fizzle. A total distance of probably 100 yards covered and I had already thrown in the towel. I was of course tired and emotional. Of course my fellow passengers found this wildly amusing – the bastards – and it was thanks to some dodgy driving that we ever got back to the Iroquois at all.
The next day we went with Martin to EARS studio in colourfully named East Orange, New Jersey to see what American record making was all about. Martin was a bit shaken. Someone had tried to break into his
Gramercy Park hotel room the previous night, while he was sleeping. Quite understandable really. British burglars tended to wait until the premises were vacant before starting work. Not in New York. Anything goes it seemed.
Tracklist for ‘Ceremony’ and ‘IALP’, decorated by Martin Hannett.
The engineer Bruce has us booked in as Joy Division. He’d never heard of New Order. Nobody had. He’d been in Vietnam (so he said) and drank coke with milk. Bruce was a bit of a space cadet. This predictably for Hannett made for a bit of an uneasy mix. When was it anything else with Martin and engineers? This was Bruce’s first taste of it. Tony and Rob’s thinking had been that we’d get that NY sound or at least a different sound by recording here. Somewhere different to Strawberry or Britannia Row. The studio had that seventies varnished wooden look (shades of beige and brown), complete with the impressively large monitors either side of the triple-glazed window that let the producer and engineer view the musicians toiling at their art.
In the studio I loved listening to the sound of tape rewinding. Waiting for another take (with Martin another take was never far away). Listening to the whup, whup, whup as the track played in reverse was to me a source of wonder and inspiration. Like Strawberry, EARS had the same chilly air-conditioning, the same fake leather sofa at the back and the same coffee machine that nobody ever bothered with.
‘Where’s the fucking tea?’
‘Do you not have any instant?’
Our ice-breaking repartee. Or as in Bernard’s case, his catchphrase: ‘Can you turn those lights off, they’re getting in my eyes.’ Lights have been causing Bernard’s eyes distress since 1977. He can get very troubled by them.
Low light was essential for the recording of ‘In a Lonely Place’. The brooding darkness came together pretty easily, aided by Martin’s electronically manufactured ambience together with a pretty nasty white noise thunder impression from my drum synthesiser. I got the impression that this was not really the sort of music that Bruce was used to working on. The amped-up Omni strings sounded suitably malign. Eerie and frightening.
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