The band’s return has been met with acclaim around the world — leaving Sumner both amused and bemused. The once-boyish singer, now bespectacled and avuncular, wonders, “How does it happen that we’re big in South Korea? We’re like The Beatles in Chile. 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. Don’t do any gigs [in a particular place], and don’t release any records there, and you’ll be massive.”http://arts.nationalpost...rries-on-without-a-hook/At the end of a jubilant concert last December in London, New Order frontman Bernard Sumner played his last chord and shouted to the crowd, “We’ll be back!” Normally such a statement wouldn’t mean much, but in the context of New Order’s fragile, unpredictable and even implausible history, it was significant indeed.
The famed Mancunian group that arose from the embers of Joy Division in 1980, after singer Ian Curtis took his own life, has never technically split up, but its existence has often seemed imperiled by bad business decisions and interpersonal spats. The quartet went on an unannounced hiatus for five years in 1993, and in 2007, bassist Peter Hook, who wanted out, claimed the band no longer existed — a fact disputed by Sumner and founding drummer Stephen Morris. New Order remained dormant until Hook started touring Joy Division material with his own band, The Light, last year.
“When he did that,” Sumner says, “we just thought. … ‘Why are we holding back with New Order? He’s shown us the light’ — if you’ll excuse the pun.” With Hook grumbling from the sidelines, Sumner and Morris, with the latter’s wife, original keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, enlisted two newer members and embarked on a world tour, visiting places they hadn’t played for ages, or indeed ever.
On the day after the band’s first Toronto date in 19 years, late last month at the Sony Centre, Sumner is resting a bad knee on the couch of a hotel room and nursing a cold, yet he seems content to be fulfilling old promises: “I said last night, ‘I’d said we’d come back.’ ” The gig had sold out within an hour, and another was added for the next day; judging by the crowd’s ecstatic response, New Order’s return wasn’t just a money-grabbing endeavour by a superannuated ’80s act. The past decade, in fact, has proved good to the band: Joy Division’s streamlined intensity remains an inescapable influence on a generation of post-post-punk guitar groups, and New Order’s pioneering fusion of rock with electronic dance music sounds more relevant now than ever.
The band’s return has been met with acclaim around the world — leaving Sumner both amused and bemused. The once-boyish singer, now bespectacled and avuncular, wonders, “How does it happen that we’re big in South Korea? We’re like The Beatles in Chile. 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. Don’t do any gigs [in a particular place], and don’t release any records there, and you’ll be massive.”
If anything, in their earlier years, New Order seemed keen to shoot themselves in the foot, as they garnered a reputation as an unreliable live act. “We were an on-and-off band,” Sumner admits. “Part of the reason was sometimes we were just completely hungover and f–ked up … but more than that was that we used to just decide on what set we were going to play 20 minutes before we went onstage.”
They might “rehearse” a song in concert that they hadn’t played in years, or play half-written, half-baked material. Now, the band have somewhat curbed their partying (“In the old days,” Sumner says, “I used to enjoy the parties but not the tour — [it] took me about 28 years to understand that that’s not really a good idea”), and live, they play hits such as Temptation and True Faith along with remixed beats, loops and synchronized video. The music sounds gloriously full but retains an endearingly unpredictable human element.
New bassist Tom Chapman plays the songs’ familiar riffs, but it’s odd seeing the band without the Viking-like Hook, who with his low-slung bass has an undeniable stage presence. Since New Order announced their first “reunion” dates last year, he has been slagging off his former bandmates recurrently in the press.
Sumner sighs when speaking of Hook, as if the bassist were a long-lost but irrevocably estranged brother. He says conflict had been brewing for years, having in part to do with wrangling over shares in the name of Manchester’s now-defunct Hacienda club, which the band used to finance. According to Sumner, matters came to a head when Hook begged off recording music for the 2007 Ian Curtis biopic Control, as well as for a new album (the results of whose sessions will be released next year as the EP Lost Sirens) because of commitments on the celebrity DJ circuit. “The next thing we know, he’s gone on local radio saying New Order had split up. I’m sorry, but if a band splits up, you’re supposed to [see if] the other members want to split up. So we didn’t.”
Sumner says the members of New Order have since tried meeting with Hook, but to no avail — “He had control issues, and ego issues as well, and he wanted to be Brother No. 1 — he didn’t want compromise. Well, now he’s Brother No. 1 in The Light, so I hope he’s happy.”
But some aspects of their dispute clearly remain painful. “He said ‘Bernard never liked playing in Joy Division. … He thought it was too depressing.’ I swear on my life, that’s not true. Why would we play Joy Division last night, if that’s the case?”
At the Sony Centre, New Order finish their show with Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart — which somehow has become an anthem of togetherness. To Sumner, it “has always been a tragic, heartrending song, and for some reason on this tour, I think [in London], it’s become something else, and I don’t know why. And whether that’s just because we’re all just having a really good time — it just felt like a song of joy … a song about the future rather than a song about the past.”
.
