here's some sample pages, and the OCR versions. i have converted the book to PDF now.
01
Foreword I Douglas Coupland
There was universality to New Order. It preselected for you all the right people.
There was something post-political about New Order. In the early 1980s everyone realized that the world was f*cked up and there was maybe the unspoken consensus that a genuine new political order might
appear and save the world from itself. The early 1980s were a moment in history when a lot of systems seemed to be failing. AIDS was getting worse by the day; politics seemed to be about rationalizing thuggery;
fashion was shit; nature was dying; the default tone of mass society was people in acid-wash denim strolling past a polling station that they never bothered to enter. It was a society of loopholes in the social contract that
somehow always defaulted on the side of voidness. New Order gave hope that the shit would all end.
New Order never really did videos the way other bands did in the 1980s. I remember the video to ‘Perfect Kiss’ and thinking to myself, “This is the most boring video ever made.” It was basically just the band
turning machines on and off, and yet while this video might have been boring, it was also perfect. You wanted to be there in the room with the band turning the machines on and off, too.
In the marketing industry it’s a well-known fact that the music you feel the most sentimental about later in life is the music you were listening to at the age of 23 1/2. That’s certainly true of me, but there seems to
be something eternal about New Order as well - they never went away, and their listenership grows and evolves with every new year, and the music invariably finds, and is found by, a certain sort of person who looks at
the human/ machine equation and refuses to take sides, knowing that science and industry cut many ways. In the auction and furniture world, the moment a chair, say, goes out of production, it becomes more
collectible, and if the maker reissues that chair years later, the reissue is in no way collectible. I think the same law applies to music; the moment a band stops, they can’t start again. It pleases me to see Kevin
Cummins’s photos of a band that never stopped making what they make, doing so under the excruciating lens of modernity, in which all steps of growth and decay are documented in cruel detail. Nothing cruel here.
Respect, integrity, and a sense of the future that is filled with both possibilities and dread.
Driving alone through Chelyabinsk, 2014.
Driving alone through Pyongyang, 2016.
Driving alone into Antarctica, 2017.
Driving alone across the Moon, 2020.
Conversation
New Order and Kevin Cummins
Gillian Gilbert
Kevin Cummins
When did you first meet Stephen?
Gillian Gilbert
My sister and a friend and I used to go to Manchester a lot to go and see bands. I wasn’t into the disco-dancing scene, I'd rather see a band, so we used to go see Magazine and the Buzzcocks. I sat next to Stephen’s
sister at school, so she would tell me about this weird brother she had, playing drums for Joy Division. We knew about the Factory club, and I knew Ian and Stephen were from Macclesfield, so we got to know what they
looked like and one night we just said hello. But the first time we met came about when my sister and I got on the front of the Macclesfield Express because we wanted to start a punk band. This was when punk
sounded really bad in Macclesfield, and we went to an all-girls school so it was even weirder. We got all these phone calls from a group called the Inadequates, who asked us to join them, and they used to practice next
door to Joy Division.
KC Were you surprised that Rob Gretton asked you to join the band when Ian died?
GG It was a surprise, and I think it was also quite unusual at the time, because everybody thought they were going to find a straight replacement for Ian. I don’t think Rob wanted that, I know the rest of the band didn’t
want that.
KC But you had no background in music, did you?
GG Well, I could play the guitar a bit, my uncle taught me to play guitar. But it’s funny - with history you forget how at the beginning you’re all struggling. Barney [Bernard Sumner] didn’t particularly want to be the singer,
which he kept bringing up every couple of months but which everybody forgets now. It was all unknown, and perhaps we should have brought another singer in, or perhaps we should have done this or done that. But
you’d never know whether or not you’d have been a success. I think part of New Order is that it was unusual bringing a girl in who didn’t know how to play much, had never written a song. It was the best move New
Order made.
KC Did you have any reservations about joining the band?
GG Only that I thought my mum and dad wouldn’t let me join! I don’t think I was even twenty-one, which sounds old now but at that time meant you were still influenced by your parents. I had two sisters, I went to an
all-girls school, and suddenly I was going around with this bunch of men. But they’d met Stephen and my dad had been away on ships, he was in the navy, and he used to talk about traveling all the time, and how with
family and kids he couldn’t. So he said, “Just go.”
KC Probably not thinking that thirty years later you’d still be doing it.
GG Well, he died a couple of years ago, but when I joined back with New Order and I used to go home and tell him all the tales, he’d say he’d never seen me so happy.
KC Did you miss the band, after you’d split up?
GG I just missed being with everybody. But I knew when Rob died that was the end for me. I always felt like he stood up for me, he stood up for the whole New Order thing. Because he believed in it. I don’t think
everything was a mistake,
07
later
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Edited by user 03 February 2017 14:40:15(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified
