Tag: Factory Records (Page 3 of 3)

A Beginner’s Guide To MARK REEDER

Mark Reeder has carved out an impressive reputation for his catalogue of fine remixes.

When Mark Reeder spoke to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK in 2011 about his remixing style, he said: “I’m old school. I like to still be able to hear the song, but give it my own signature and atmosphere, while at the same time use as many of the original elements as possible”.

He had moved to West-Berlin from Manchester in 1978, having become fascinated by the artistic diversity of the city and was Factory Records representative in Germany between 1978 to 1982. He is credited with introducing Bernard Sumner to the world of electronically propelled dance music, thus being instrumental in the development of NEW ORDER’s influential hybrid sound.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Reeder had great success with his electronic dance music record label Masterminded For Success (MFS). For the last few years, Reeder has been heavily involved in a documentary film about his adopted home city:

“’B-Movie (Lust & Sound in West-Berlin)’ is about the forgotten city of West-Berlin during the 80s. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, not only did communist East Germany cease to exist, but the walled-in island of West-Berlin did too. Most people have forgotten, or have no idea how the city was back then. In ‘B-Movie’, I guide the viewer through this decade, but as the film is also about my life in this city too, I show you some of the things I saw and experienced during the 1980s, while participating in what has now become, the legendary subkultur of West Berlin.”

In a break from his hectic worldwide schedule promoting ‘B-Movie (Lust & Sound in West-Berlin)’, Mark Reeder kindly gave an insightful commentary into the tracks that shaped his own musical career.


DIE UNBEKANNTEN Radio War (1981)

Reeder formed DIE UNBEKANNTEN with Alistair Gray when he settled in West-Berlin.

We were actually given the name DIE UNBEKANNTEN by a journalist, who saw our feeble first gig at the SO36. That gig was supposed to have been just a one-off, but he was surprisingly impressed and thought we were very avant-garde and apparently enjoyed our miserable performance.

In his magazine review of the event, he just called us two unknown Englishmen and from then on, people just called us DIE UNBEKANNTEN (“The Unknown”). A few weeks later, we played at the Genial Dilletanten Festival and were inadvertently presented as ‘Necropolis’, which was actually the title of our intro track.

A while later, after Elisabeth Recker of Monogam Records witnessed what was probably our most chaotic performance – we were on acid – she believed we would fit perfectly with the abstract style of the rest of the artists on her record label.

Our Swiss friend Thomas Wydler became our drummer and we recorded a three track EP featuring ‘Radio War’, ‘Poseidon’ and ‘Casualties’. The record not only sounded nothing like any of Monogam’s previous releases, but it also caused a lot of controversy because of my design for its front cover image (a photo depicting three East German border guards) and the striking Germanic style of type face which I had chosen.

Our second, and final DIE UNBEKANNTEN record, was much more electronic. By this time, Thomas had left us and joined DIE HAUT and we had gone back to using a drum machine and had also acquired some more electronic instruments. Our friend, Adrian Wright from THE HUMAN LEAGUE gave us a brand new drum computer to test for him.

He had actually been asked to try out a very early prototype Roland TR606, but couldn’t be bothered and so he gave it to us to trial for him, so along with the Transcendent 2000 (the very same one which Bernard Sumner had played in JOY DIVISION with) and a Moog that Klaus Schulze had also given us, we immediately went into the studio and recorded ‘Don’t Tell Me Stories’ for our ‘Dangerous Moonlight’ EP. This became the first record to feature a Roland TR606.

Available on the album ‘B-Music: Der Soundtrack zum Film B-Movie’ (V/A) via DEF Media

https://www.facebook.com/lustandsoundinwestberlin/


MALARIA! Geld (1982)

One of the bands who grabbed Reeder’s attention in West-Berlin were the uncompromising all-female combo MALARIA!

I already knew Bettina Koester and Gudrun Gut from their first band MANIA-D. Musically, their approach was so different from anything I had ever heard before, as the conventional rules of male dominated rock and roll didn’t apply to the way these girls made music at all and that was what made them so exciting.

They were no virtuosos, but that didn’t matter one bit, because it was exactly that ingredient which made their music so interesting. After Beate Bartel left MANIA-D to form LIAISONS DANGEREUSES, Gudrun and Bettina formed MALARIA! a five piece all-girl band and quite an international one too, being a mixture of German, American and Dutch.

Their striking, on-stage image, all dressed in black with bright red lips, is considered a Goth image nowadays; but back in the 80s, MALARIA! did it first, and after their debut appearance in London with THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, this image was obviously hi-jacked from them for the Robert Palmer video ‘Addicted To Love’, even to the point of making the emphasis that the girls in his video also couldn’t play their instruments.

At some point very early on, I became their manager. At that time, I was the only man allowed into their sphere, and because I knew what the band wanted to sound like live, I also became their sound engineer too and naturally, as I also had my own band, DIE UNBEKANNTEN, we became their support band. The girls trusted me, they knew I understood their ideology and I liked their music and most importantly, I didn’t interfere.

Available on the album ‘B-Music: Der Soundtrack zum Film B-Movie’ (V/A) via DEF Media

http://www.m-enterprise.de/malaria.html


SHARK VEGAS Love Habit (1986)

Reeder’s own musical journey has to an extent, mirrored that of Bernard Sumner’s. DIE UNBEKANNTEN morphed into SHARK VEGAS to become a more electronic and disco friendly proposition.

After performing for nearly four years as DIE UNBEKANNTEN, we were asked by NEW ORDER if we would like to accompany them on their European tour after the success of ‘Blue Monday’.

We decided this would be a good moment to change our name and musical style, especially after adding two new members to our band. Besides, after our first disastrous London performance in the Barracuda Club, I thought DIE UNBEKANNTEN was much too difficult to pronounce outside of Germany, as people thought we were called DIE UNBEKANNTEN as in “Death Unbekannten” and so we urgently needed a new name and image.

Me and my partner-in-crime, Alistair Gray just threw a few ideas together one night and SHARK VEGAS became our name. I wanted something obscure sounding that didn’t actually mean anything apart from it being our band name.

Al and I were huge fans of pulsating electronic dance music – most probably since ‘I Feel Love’ – and the small Berlin underground gay-disco scene, which ran parallel to the abstract avant-garde scene, was the place to go and always a great way to spend a late Friday and Saturday night, before finally crashing and burning in the Risiko club.

Besides, musically, DIE UNBEKANNTEN had already been moving away from being depressive and miserable and had become much more electronic high energy disco too, so this tour proposal presented itself as a welcome opportunity to literally, regroup.

During a short break in the NEW ORDER tour, we went into Conny Plank’s studio with Bernard Sumner and recorded our first single ‘You Hurt Me’, but the session was a bit of a disaster, as the studio engineer had a slipped disc and was in terrible pain. He had to lie on a camp bed in front of the mixing desk and shout instructions up to us, while Conny Plank spent all his time playing table tennis in the yard outside. That single became FAC111.

‘Love Habit’ was one of the tracks we initially recorded during the session for the FacUS ‘Young, Popular & Sexy’ compilation. We were asked to perform ‘Love Habit’ for a video, for a special Berlin edition of ‘Music Box’, Britain’s first cable TV music show and using my US Army AFN contacts, I managed to get permission to make our video on the divided Glienickebrücke (the so-called ‘Bridge of Spies’). In the video, we appear as beaten up and tortured spies in raincoats, as if we had just been let out of an East German prison.

Unfortunately, the US army forgot to inform the Soviet Army that we were making a video on the bridge and so, on the East side there was a right flap on. They sent out East German patrol boats to find out what we were doing on the bridge. I guess they thought we were trying to provoke World War III. ‘Love Habit’ was intended to be an album track, but it became one of the last songs we recorded as SHARK VEGAS and it was never released, at least not until we included it on the recent ‘B-Movie’ soundtrack.

Available on the album ‘B-Music: Der Soundtrack zum Film B-Movie’ (V/A) via DEF Media

https://www.facebook.com/markreedermusic/


DIE VISION Love By Wire (1990)

Released on East German state label AMIGA, DIE VISION’s ‘Torture’ was the last album to be recorded in communist East Berlin in 1989 and featured Reeder as producer.

I was invited by the band to be the producer for their debut album. At first it seemed incredible that they had actually managed to get the AMIGA to agree, as no-one from the West had ever been allowed in their state-run recording studio.

It transpired that because the band were allowed officially to sing in English(ese), they agreed to let them have an English-speaking producer too. In reality, I later discovered, the STASI wanted to know what kind of subversive activity I was involved in, especially after helping to arrange two illegal and meanwhile legendary secret gigs with West German punk band DIE TOTEN HOSEN in East Berlin. So I guess this was their brilliant plan to keep a close watch on me.

DIE VISION’s singer Uwe, was studying English at the Humbolt University – to be able to do that, you had to speak fluent Russian too – and he was so very insistent that I come over and produce their album. So I did. What an opportunity. Now, forming a band in communist East Germany was very, very difficult. It was nothing like forming a band in the West.

You couldn’t just go into a shop and buy a guitar, bass and drums and bash away. Everything was controlled by the Communist state, especially music. Before you could play to the public, your ability was first considered, then your song lyrics scrutinised to see if there were any subversive hidden anti-state messages and even getting electric instruments was difficult, you needed permits to first buy and then one to play, an electric guitar in public.

Then as a band, you performed before a group of people, who would assess your proficiency. This determined if, when, or where you might be able to play, eg youth clubs and how much you would get paid. DIE VISION had quite a sudden rise in popularity in the East and rather than ban them, the Authorities decided to sign them, that way everything would be under control. That is, until I came along…

As we were making this album, the GDR was literally falling apart. It was very difficult making this album with a feeling of imminent doom hanging over the studio and with constant power fluctuations, people fleeing to the West and general grumbling unrest. I called the album ‘Torture’ because it was exactly that to make!

Available on the DIE VISION album ‘Torture’ via AMIGA / Zong & Vulture Records

https://www.discogs.com/artist/114367-Die-Vision


PAUL VAN DYK Words – Original Version radio edit by Paul van Dyk, Wolfgang Ragwitz + Mark Reeder (1996)

In 1990, Reeder established MFS and discovered Trance DJ Paul van Dyk…

One of my first artists on MFS, COSMIC BABY made some great records, but DJs kept complaining that they couldn’t play them because he always had DJ-unfriendly intros. I suggested he find a DJ who could help him to construct DJ friendly intros to his tracks.

One night, Cosmic was performing live in the Turbine club. One of the warm up DJs was a young lad called Paul van Dyk. The two hit it off almost immediately and I suggested that Paul come to the office the following Monday to discuss working with Cosmic. Paul told me he was from Hamburg, but it later turned out he was originally from Eisenhuettenstadt in deepest East Germany, but had moved to East Berlin before applying to leave East Germany for Hamburg shortly before the wall came down.

I was actually very happy to hear he was from East Germany, because that was my initial intention with MFS to create a platform for young Eastie kids; he was my first.

One night, he came to me while I was working in my bar and begged me to help him to become a professional DJ.

He was working as an apprentice carpenter at that time and absolutely hated it. I told him, if he would promise me that he would work hard to be the best DJ in the world, then I would help him to achieve his goal. I told him there were no prizes for second best.

I put him in the studio with Cosmic and they recorded two amazing singles together as THE VISIONS OF SHIVA.

Then I let him remix HUMATES’s track ‘Love Stimulation’ and that remix attracted a lot of attention. I knew from the start that he could do it simply because he was ambitious enough. He didn’t know it at that time of course, because his talent had to be coaxed out of him. By giving him a platform and motivation and the help of Johnny Klimek’s studio, he was able to discover his own music making talent.

Of course, I believed absolutely in Paul and invested everything, love, creativity, all my time and effort and all I had in propelling him onto an international stage. I guided and advised him, compiled and mastered his records, designed his covers and basically created the legend of Paul Van Dyk.

I used my contacts and credibility to get him high profile remixes, such as ‘Spooky’ by NEW ORDER and even answered his interviews, anything which would enhance his credibility, profile and status. Sadly, once he had reached the brink of DJ superstardom, he decided he no longer needed me and ditched me without a word of thanks.

Available on the PAUL VAN DYK single ‘Words – Part 2’ via MFS

http://www.paulvandyk.com/


SAM TAYLOR-WOOD & PET SHOP BOYS I’m In Love With A German Filmstar – Stuck In The 80s remix (2008)

The ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ film director recorded a number of covers with her favourite pop duo like ‘J T’aime… Moi Non Plus’, ‘Love To Love You Baby’ and this new wave classic…

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe asked me to do this remix after hearing the mix I had made of ‘Miracle Cure’ featuring Bernard Sumner for BLANK & JONES. It was quite thrilling being asked to do this song, as I’ve always loved the original.

The PET SHOP BOYS / SAM TAYLOR-WOOD version was more minimalistic and techno sounding though, so I thought I would make mine more retro-modern-disco sounding. I thought, as its going to be released on Kompakt, they are probably going to have banging techno remixes done anyway.

I know they were completely surprized at the label to hear it, because they really expected me to make some sort of cheesy trance mix. It is such an iconic and mystical song though, and I was worried I would be able to do it justice as a dance track. I made three different versions, a long mix and two shorter mixes and all in 5.1 surround sound, which I put on ‘Five Point One’.

I was very pleased when Sam said she thought it was “wicked” and totally relieved that the Boys also liked it too. But when THE PASSIONS contacted me themselves, to tell me that they really loved it, well, that was like a stone being lifted from my heart.

Available on the MARK REEDER remix album ‘Five Point One’ via Kennan Limited

http://petshopboys.co.uk/


BLANK & JONES, MARK REEDER Manifesto – Save Yourself Mix (2009)

Reeder collaborated with popular German dance duo BLANK & JONES on a restyling project entitled ‘ReOrdered’ which featured Bernard Sumner, Robert Smith and Claudia Brücken. But one of the album’s highlights was ‘Manifesto’ featuring Vanessa Daou.

‘Manifesto’ was actually the third track of Vanessa’s that I reworked for ‘ReOrdered’. The first was ‘Consequences’.

I really liked her voice and her lyrics though and I asked BLANK & JONES if I could rework another track, that was ‘Heart Of Wax’. After that, the idea for ‘ReOrdered’ was born and I would go on to rework all BLANK & JONES’ vocal-dance tracks into songs, it was a bit like back engineering a remix. The first two tracks were quite soft, so I wanted ‘Manifesto’ to be a little tougher and sound more like a nu-beat track with trippy elements.

Available on the BLANK & JONES, MARK REEDER album ‘ReOrdered’ via Soundcolours

http://www.blankandjones.com/


BAD LIEUTENANT Sink Or Swim – Rettungstring Radio remix (2010)

Prior to the recent return of NEW ORDER sans Hooky, Bernard Sumner had an interim, guitar led project BAD LIEUTENANT. However, many followers of NEW ORDER missed the sound Sumner had become synonymous for.

After Hooky decided to leave NEW ORDER, I think Bernard needed some distance and formed BAD LIEUTENANT, together with Jake Evans and the remaining members of NEW ORDER.

Jake is such a talented person and a brilliant guitarist – he’s definitely one to watch in the future. I really liked the parent album ‘Never Cry Another Tear’, it’s a wonderful summer album and I think it is very underrated. I was given the opportunity to do some remixes for them and decided to rework their guitar tracks into electronic dance versions.

‘Sink Or Swim’ was the first and I think I made about six different versions of this track, Bernard took the piss out of me for the amount of mixes we made. The song had been performed live and so the tempo varied within the song from the start to finish, which made it a bloody nightmare to mix into a 4/4 dance track.

To make it sound organic, we had to take all the instruments and slice them up and then carefully put them back together again by hand. It was a mammoth task and at the time, I thought “I never want to have to do that again”.

After ‘Sink Or Swim’, we mixed ‘Twist Of Fate’, which I also made about four or so mixes. The same time consuming slice and move ritual applied as with ‘Sink Or Swim’. As the remixes were only released digitally, I decided to include some of them on my ‘Five Point One’ album, and later, ‘Collaborator’.

Available on the MARK REEDER remix album ‘Collaborator’ via Factory Benelux

https://www.facebook.com/badlieutenantmusic/


JOHN FOXX Underpass – Sinister Subway remix (2010)

Reeder’s reworking of John Foxx’s calling card was mighty and he relished the challenge.

John Foxx was putting together the ‘Metatronic’ compilation album and I was in contact with his manager about something different entirely. During our conversation, he told me about the compilation and I said jokingly that I could do a remix perhaps, as a bonus track.

Well, after they had listened to a few of my remixes, he called and asked me if I would like to remix ‘Underpass’. My studio partner Micha Adam and I couldn’t believe it. It was a dream come true. No-one had ever been allowed to remix this legendary song before and so it was such an honour. Then the reality set in. If I balls this up, the fans will lynch me.

Being a huge fan of the song myself, I decided I could only do it as I would want it to sound myself. Yet I didn’t want to drive too far away from the original though either and wanted to keep as many elements in there as possible.

I was sent the parts, eight tracks in all… but that iconic massive synth riff was missing. All I had been given was the riff, played by a small tinny sounding synth. Well, that was it. I realised, the huge reverb sound was added live, during the mix-down and so we had to reconstruct it.

I recalled what kind of instrumentation and effects they might have used back then and dug out my old Space Echo. Once we had reconstructed the original version, we made a 5.1 mix of it (it is a hidden Easter Egg on ‘Five Point One’). Then, I remixed it. I made three versions, a short radio mix in stereo and 5.1 plus a longer Sinister Subway mix for the ‘Metatronic’ compilation album.

Available on the JOHN FOXX album ‘Metatronic’ via Metamatic Records

http://www.metamatic.com/


ANNE CLARK If… – Seemingly forever remix (2011)

Cult goth icon ANNE CLARK is an English poet, who sets her poems to music and is probably more well-known outside of the UK.

Anne is truly a great artist. I first met her when she played in Berlin after recording ‘Sleeper In Metropolis’ with David Harrow, who lived in Berlin at that time. This timeless track is one of my all-time favourite 80s songs and it became almost like an anthem to the divided city, especially so to the kids in the East.

She was (and still is) absolutely adored in the East, mainly because her dark and descriptive poetry set to music, clearly struck a chord with them and it was something they all could identify with. Side two of her first album was recorded with Vini Reilly of THE DURUTTI COLUMN. She kept with the electronic side and made her second album with JOHN FOXX. Over the years, she has cultivated her poetry with a wide variety of musical sounds from Synthetic to Rock to Classical.

After a chance meeting a few years ago, when she performed in the Russian embassy in Berlin, I reworked the track ‘The Hardest Heart’ she had made for BLANK & JONES for our ‘ReOrdered’ album and then I remixed two of her tracks ‘Full Moon’ and ‘If…’ in 5.1 surround sound for my ‘Five Point One’ album,

Available on the MARK REEDER remix album ‘Five Point One’ via Kennan Limited

http://anneclarkofficial.com/


DEPECHE MODE Sweetest Perfection – Sweetest Conception remix (2011)

Reeder was given the opportunity to rework a track from the ‘Violator’ album by Daniel Miller.

Like ‘Underpass’, this was almost reverential territory. Depeche were putting together the ‘Remixes 2 81-11’ compilation and Daniel asked me if I would like to do a remix for it. By the time I had received the list of possible tracks to remix, all the most popular songs had been taken and so I was left with songs no-one dared to touch.

‘Sweetest Perfection’ was always one of my favourite tracks though and I thought it would be a real challenge to remix. Not only in terms of actually attempting to remix it, but with the thought that as a fan, how would I want it to sound and if I f*cked up, I would probably have to leave the planet.

We already had a really short deadline to finish the remix on and only three days into the mix, I got a call from my mother telling me that my dad had been rushed to hospital with a broken hip after being pushed over. The situation looked very serious, he was a very old man and the doctors didn’t give him much chance of survival. I had to down tools and fly over and consequently, I missed the deadline for submitting my remix for the DM album.

Photo by Anton Corbijn

Fortunately, I was in the process of putting ‘Five Point One’ together and decided to finish the remix anyway and asked Daniel if I could license it for my album. He spoke with the band and they said I could (I was told it was the first time a previously unreleased DM song had ever appeared on another album) and as we were looking for images to accompany the 5.1 mixes, Anton Corbijn kindly gave me one of his old, unseen photos of the band for me to use.

I wanted my remix to retain as many of the original elements as possible, but I added extra strings, more swirling synths and a real bass guitar, as well as my own little riff with a broken piano which I hoped would make it sound a bit more Eastern European.

Available on the MARK REEDER remix album ‘Five Point One’ via Kennan Limited

http://www.depechemode.com/


ELECTROBELLE Falling – In Your Heart remix (2011)

Reeder took a liking to stop / start Midlands duo ELECTROBELLE and delivered an edgier reimagining of ‘Falling’ before they belatedly released it themselves in 2012!

I heard ‘Mirrorball’ by ELECTROBELLE on the 2009 ‘Electronically Yours’ compilation released by Undo Records. I really liked Charlotte’s vocal style and so I asked them if they would like to contribute a track to my ‘Five Point One’ album.

They sent me the parts of a demo track they had made and this became ‘Falling’. The idea for the ‘Five Point One’ album was to include remixes I had made for famous artists, coupled with lesser known ones and mix them all in 5.1 Dolby surround sound.

Available on the MARK REEDER remix album ‘Five Point One’ via Kennan Limited

https://www.facebook.com/electrobelle/


MARSHEAUX So Close – So Close remix (2011)

While busy remixing legends in synthesized pop, Reeder also kept an eye on newer acts that were emerging from Europe…

I had been a fan of Undo records, FOTONOVELA and MARSHEAUX for a while and after ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK posted a link to one of their tracks, I asked Chi if he could hook us up, as I thought that ‘So Close’ would fit in well on my ‘Five Point One’ album and asked them if I could remix it.

‘So Close’ had a melancholic element, but I wanted to give the song a more filmic feeling and make it even more melancholic, with sweeping strings and added bass guitar. Filmmaker Paul Morgens heard the track and immediately loved it. He made a great video for it made up of old footage he had found in his aunties archive.

Available on the MARSHEAUX deluxe album ‘Inhale’ via Undo Records

http://www.marsheaux.com/


DIE TOTEN HOSEN Disco – Lange Hosen remix (2011)

Düsseldorf punk veterans DIE TOTEN HOSEN have maintained a long standing kinship with Mark Reeder.

I first met Campino in Bochum. MALARIA! were playing a gig there and he was allocated as my driver. He told me about his new band DIE TOTEN HOSEN and about their hideous, but hilarious high-waisted flared trousers, which they bought by the kilo.

A couple of months later, I became their live sound engineer, and together with my rebelliously minded Eastie friends, I managed to help organise a very secret gig with them in an East-Berlin Church. It was disguised as a religious church service, a so-called Blues Mass. Although heavily monitored, the East German clergy was seen as a passive resistance movement against the communist government and although not officially acknowledged, they were tolerated and thus had a certain amount of flexibility within the system. That way we could arrange our secret gig there using this loophole.

DIE UNBEKANNTEN went on tour with DIE TOTEN HOSEN and one of the highlights was performing in the Kogasz club, in the Karl-Marx-University in Budapest. It was supposed to have been a top secret gig in the Young Artists club to a few music lovers, organised by photographer Janos Veto, but so many people eventually wanted to see the gig, that it was moved to the University.

During this tour we had many problems with our car. DIE TOTEN HOSEN were so sceptical our car would even survive the trip, they bet us a crate of beer, that we wouldn’t make it to Budapest.

We did, but had such a horror trip just trying to get there, as our car kept breaking down. Upon our arrival in the University, Janos told us we couldn’t play! The authorities had decided the gig was illegal and it had officially been pulled, but we thought we have come all this way so f*ck them and we did the gig anyway.

After we had performed, someone stole our drum computer. We were paid in beer vouchers (Hungarian Forints) and had so much of it, we invited everyone in the YAC for drinks, as we couldn’t take the cash out of the country… I don’t remember much about that night after that.

‘Disco’ was a track off the DIE TOTEN HOSEN album ‘In Alle Stille’ and I thought it would be fun to make an Italo disco sounding mix of this track. The original is a fast paced, rock song and when we received the parts, we discovered there were about 40 guitar tracks. We had to apply the same procedure as with BAD LIEUTENANT in slicing and moving all the elements so that they would fit into the new tempo and yet still sound organic.

Available on the MARK REEDER remix album ‘Five Point One’ via Kennan Limited

http://www.dietotenhosen.de/


KOISHII & HUSH featuring JOHN TAYLOR C’est Tout Est Noir – Black Night Remix (2013)

‘C’est Tout Est Noir’ was the DURAN DURAN bassist’s best lead vocal since his solo single ‘I Do What I Do’ in 1986.

KOISHII & HUSH had made a remix for BAD LIEUTENANT’s ‘Twist of Fate’ and after telling me how much they liked my version, they asked me if I would like to remix their track ‘C’est Tout Est Noir’ which they had made together with DURAN DURAN bassist John Taylor.

At first, I thought he would be playing bass guitar on the track, but then to my surprise he was the vocalist. He has a great voice and I really liked the track. The original is quite trancey, so I wanted to make it more cinematic and add some guitar and extra bass. John loved it and immediately used my rough demo as his soundtrack to a vlog he’d made flying from Austria to LA.

Available on the MARK REEDER remix album ‘Collaborator’ via Factory Benelux

http://www.koishiiandhush.com/


QUEEN OF HEARTS United (2013)

QUEEN OF HEARTS Cocoon2CDA stomping electro disco number produced by Reeder, Elizabeth Morphew’s cooing Bush-like howls and breathy euphoria were a total delight to the ears while the mighty cavernous sound provided the heat!

I saw an ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK piece posted about QUEEN OF HEARTS and I was immediately curious. I really liked Elizabeth’s voice from the moment I heard the first couple of tracks.

Chi thought we might make a nice collaboration and so I got in touch with her to compliment her and she asked me to remix ‘Neon’ which eventually ended up on ‘Collaborator’. We then made a cover version together of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’. I then wrote two songs ‘Suicide’ and ‘United’ for her debut album ‘Cocoon’.

Available on the QUEEN OF HEARTS deluxe album ‘Cocoon’ via Night Moves

http://iamqueenofhearts.com/


WESTBAM featuring BERNARD SUMNER She Wants – Old School remix (2013)

Techno legend WESTBAM made his return with the impressive ‘Götterstrasse’ which featured Iggy Pop, Hugh Cornwell, Brian Molko and Lil Wayne. Naturally, Reeder reworked an excellent track featuring the vocals of Bernard Sumner.

My relationship with WESTBAM goes back to the early days when he was trying to establish himself as a DJ in Berlin. He played in the Metropol disco and towards the end of the 80s in the UFO club.

His involvement in the evolution of the Berlin Techno scene is reluctantly accepted, but arguably without his engagement, many things probably wouldn’t have happened. He was a vital participant in parties and events and was the first Berlin DJ to play in the Soviet Union.

While we were putting ideas for songs for ‘B-Movie’ together, he gave us a demo of ‘You Need The Drugs’ featuring Richard Butler of THE PSYCHEDLIC FURS. It was a great track and we all immediately loved it.

He said he was making a songs album and would love to make a track with Bernard Sumner on vocals. He sent Bernard the demo and he really liked the track and agreed to do it. As thanks, I was given the opportunity to remix it which was perfect timing, as I was in the process of putting together my ‘Collaborator’ compilation for Factory Benelux and we could therefore give it a physical release on CD.

Available on the MARK REEDER remix album ‘Collaborator’ via Factory Benelux

http://westbam.com/


MODERN FAMILY UNIT Mmh Mmh Aahh – Eyy & Aarrgghh remix (2015)

Reeder went back to Manchester to rework the local electro wave duo MFU and added some Berlin Burlesque groove.

Dave Haslam told me about MFU and that they would like a remix. They sent me ‘Mmh Mmh Aahh’ and I loved it. I don’t know why, but it reminded me somehow of early ROXY MUSIC. I wanted to make it a bit dancier, but retain its overall atmosphere and add a little bit of Berlin mystique with the zither.

Available on the single ‘Mmh Mmh Aahh’ via GaS Records

http://www.modernfamilyunit.co.uk/


MARK REEDER Mauerstadt (2015)

From the soundtrack to Reeder’s film ‘B-Movie’, it enabled him to soundtrack his memories of the divided city with a 21st century outlook.

During the ‘B-Movie’ editing process, we wanted to use the DAF track ‘Kebab Träume’ for the burning of the Berlin Wall birthday sequence, but after long and rather unproductive negotiations, they wouldn’t let us have it.

So I decided I would write a track myself, using only a couple of analogue sequencers and synths to accompany this great piece of footage by the incredible Knut Hoffmeister.

Available on the album ‘B-Music: Der Soundtrack zum Film B-Movie’ (V/A) via DEF Media

http://www.b-movie-der-film.de/


NEW ORDER Singularity – Duality Remix (2016)

When NEW ORDER made their recorded return with ‘Music Complete’, Reeder was given the opportunity to rework some tracks and indirectly became part of their new live show.

I was asked if I would like to remix a track from the latest NEW ORDER album so I chose one of my favourite songs ‘Academic’, as it seemed like it was up for the challenge, being mainly a traditional style guitar track.

But while I was in Bucharest with ‘B-Movie’ and hanging out with CROWD CONTROL, I got an urgent call asking if I would be able to make a quick remix of ‘Singularity’. I raced back home and immediately started work on it.

It’s a great track and I really enjoyed remixing it. Which is fitting, Bernard was also so impressed with my ‘B-Movie’, that he asked me if NEW ORDER could use some footage for their backdrop video in their live shows.

This was so well received, that it then became the promo video clip for the ‘Singularity’ single. The even faster-cut images and theme of the song work really well together with the music. When NEW ORDER performed recently in Berlin, I was very pleased to have the honour of introducing the band.

Available on the single ‘Singularity’ via Mute Artists

http://www.neworder.com/


ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its grateful thanks to Mark Reeder

The film ‘B-Movie (Lust & Sound in West-Berlin)’ is available now on DVD, Bluray and download

http://www.5point1.org/info.html

https://twitter.com/markreedermfs


Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
26th March 2016

With an identifiable post-modern aesthetic and idealistic ethos, Factory Records was one of the most iconic record labels that emerged post-punk.

Founded in 1978 by Granada TV presenter Tony Wilson and actor Alan Erasmus, noted record producer Martin Hannett and graphic designer Peter Saville were also part of the original directorship, along with JOY DIVISION manager Rob Gretton.

A respected television journalist, Wilson became more widely known for his TV series ‘So It Goes’ which featured acts such as BLONDIE, THE SEX PISTOLS and BUZZCOCKS, so was seen as a champion of new music.

The Factory name was first used for a club venture which showcased bands like THE DURUTTI COLUMN, CABARET VOLTAIRE and JOY DIVISION. All three featured on the label’s debut double EP release ‘A Factory Sample’. The combined run-out groove messages read: “EVERYTHING – IS REPAIRABLE – EVERYTHING – IS BROKEN”. The release was given the catalogue number FAC2, as FAC1 had been allocated to a poster designed by Peter Saville for the club.

FAC1 was famously not printed in time for the opening event but despite his reputation for not meeting deadlines, Saville’s style was to become a highly coveted and he was head-hunted in early 1980 to work for boutique Virgin subsidiary Dindisc Records who had signed OMD following their debut on Factory.

Factory Records was initially based in Alan Erasmus’ flat at 86 Palatine Road in Didsbury, Manchester. It was very much a home-based operation, with members of JOY DIVISION once being roped in to glue together the striking sandpaper sleeves for ‘The Return of THE DURUTTI COLUMN’… inspired by Situationist Guy Debord’s book ‘Mémoires’, the album was intended to destroy the records next to it but as Factory used wallpaper paste rather than glue, the sleeves later themselves fell apart!

Factory were known for their extravagant packaging, off-the-wall promotional gimmicks and in-jokes like the Menstrual Abacus (FAC8), Martin Hannett’s legal settlement (FAC61) and Rob Gretton’s dental work (FAC99). Pop magazine Smash Hits even joked that they would be doing a NEW ORDER poster magazine, but it would be baked inside a cake and made available only in the Channel Islands.

Factory’s first LP ‘Unknown Pleasures’ by JOY DIVISION was released in June 1979 to wide acclaim. But the success was later clouded by tragedy when their charismatic singer Ian Curtis took his own life in May 1980 prior to the release of the single ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and second album ‘Closer’. With the future uncertain for Factory, hopes rested on A CERTAIN RATIO. Together with Alan Erasmus, Tony Wilson managed the doomy post-punk funk merchants, but the band polarised audiences.

JOY DIVISION’s remaining members Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris recruited Gillian Gilbert to become NEW ORDER. Although their sombre 1981 debut album ‘Movement’ was generally panned, the quartet reinvigorated themselves by taking an interest in the New York club scene. This led to Factory and NEW ORDER’s decision to open a nightclub in Manchester. Legend has it that Rob Gretton (himself a former DJ) wanted to have a place where he could “ogle women”.

The move infuriated Martin Hannett, who had wanted to purchase a recording studio with a Fairlight CMI, and threatened to wind-up the company. With the Factory catalogue number of FAC51, The Haçienda opened in May 1982 and was a loss making enterprise for the next five years.

Even when the advent of acid house in 1987 filled the club every weekend thereafter, the crowds’ preference for illegal Ecstasy and therefore water, rather than the licensed and more profitable alcohol meant that Factory’s cashflow was tenuous to say the least. Problems with the Inland Revenue, Police and local gangsters meant the writing was on the wall.

However, Factory still went ahead with a move out of Palatine Road into the rather expensive FAC251 building on Charles Street in September 1990. But a major UK property slump occurred soon after and was set to cripple the label even further. By the beginning of 1992, both HAPPY MONDAYS and NEW ORDER were over budget and late in delivering their respective new albums ‘Yes Please’ and ‘Republic’.

London Records entered negotiations to take over Factory, but the deal fell through when it was discovered the label did not actually own many of its master recordings. So Factory was left to collapse in November 1992, while NEW ORDER signed a separate deal with London. When asked by Q Magazine what he was getting with London that was different from Factory, Sumner sheepishly replied “PAID!” But Factory had never been a conventional A&R led company.

It had let OMD and JAMES leave for major deals, and passed on THE SMITHS, THE STONE ROSES and BLACK BOX. It was not very business minded either, with the elaborate die-cut packaging for NEW ORDER’s ‘Blue Monday’ initially costing more than the per unit net profit.

The label’s idealistic ethos meant commercially unviable acts like MINNY POPS and STOCKHOLM MONSTERS had a platform to release records, but it also meant there was seldom enough capital coming in, other than monies from sales of JOY DIVISION and NEW ORDER. However, much of that was being syphoned off to keep The Haçienda afloat which had its own troubles relating to drug dealing, police clampdowns and rival factions of gun-toting gangsters.

In ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s view, while JOY DIVISION and NEW ORDER undoubtedly had a huge influence on music, Factory perhaps did not have a wider back catalogue that was as strong as Virgin or Mute. Smash Hits’ independent scene columnist Red Starr once said Factory’s artwork was often better than the records they contained.

But Factory’s visual presentation has made its presence felt in popular culture from Next to Givenchy, while other observers relished Tony Wilson’s cool credentials (to quote HAPPY MONDAYS’ Bez in the Factory Records edition of BBC2’s ‘Rock Famility Trees’) as “a Red on the quiet” and his undoubted ability to give a good quote.  Sadly today, many of Factory’s major players like Wilson, Rob Gretton and Martin Hannett are no longer with us.

So via its great and not so good, using a restriction of one song per artist moniker, presented here is ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s take on Factory Records’ arty, but chaotic adventure…


OMD Electricity (1979)

FAC6 was the first single released on Factory. Tony Wilson has often been credited with discovering OMD, but it is also said that he was largely oblivious to their charms. The instigation to release ‘Electricity’ on Factory came from his then-wife Lindsay Reade. According to her memoir ‘Mr Manchester and the Factory Girl’, the former Mrs Wilson reckoned that the decision to allow OMD to sign to Dindisc was a tit-for-tat response to spite her in their fractious marriage.

Available on the OMD album ‘Peel Sessions 1979-1983’ via Virgin Records

http://www.omd.uk.com


JOY DIVISION Decades (1980)

‘Atmosphere’ was JOY DIVISION’s greatest song, but was originally released on Sordide Sentimental rather than Factory as part of the ‘Licht Und Blindheit’ package. ‘Decades’ was the sonic cathedral that Martin Hannett had been striving for in the studio. With layers of ARP Omni processed through a Marshall Time Modulator and percussion enhanced through an AMS Digital Delay, it provided a solemn but beautiful Gothic backdrop for Ian Curtis’ elaborate musical suicide note.

Available on the JOY DIVISION album ‘Closer’ via London Records

http://joydivisionofficial.com/


A CERTAIN RATIO Shack Up (1980)

Originally issued on Factory’s Benelux arm which acted as an outlet for spare recordings by Factory bands, ‘Shack Up’ was a cover of a cult club favourite by BANBARRA and showcased A CERTAIN RATIO’s new funkier direction. Other subsequent exclusive releases via Factory Benelux included NEW ORDER’s superior 12 inch remix of ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ and the instrumental ‘Murder’. ‘Shack Up’ was given a more accessible ELECTRONIC makeover in 1994.

Available on the A CERTAIN RATIO album ‘Early: A Definitive Anthology Of ACR Recordings From 1978-85’ via Soul Jazz Records

https://www.acrmcr.com/


THE NAMES Night Shift (1981)

Led by Michel Sordinia, Belgian band THE NAMES were archetypical of the post-punk miserablism that Factory was signing in the wake of JOY DIVISION. Better than most of their contemporaries with the icy synth embellishing the cacophonic Martin Hannett produced soundtrack, ‘Nightshift’ was a promising release, although unlikely to crossover beyond alternative circles. Their debut album ‘Swimming’ came out on Les Disques du Crepuscule in 1982.

Available on THE NAMES album ‘Swimming’ via Factory Benelux

http://www.thenames.be/


NEW ORDER Your Silent Face (1983)

‘Your Silent Face’ was dubbed the “KRAFTWERK one”, the ultimate homage to their romantic ‘Trans-Europe Express’ era. With the replication of the Synthanorma sequence and Vako Orchestron strings from ‘Franz Schubert’ using a SCI Polysequencer and Emulator, this was the stand-out from NEW ORDER’s second album. The original artwork package featuring a cryptic colour alphabet code saw Peter Saville spell the title incorrectly as ‘Power, Corrruption & Lies’!

Available on the NEW ORDER album ‘Power, Corruption & Lies’ via London Records

http://www.neworder.com


CABARET VOLTAIRE Yashar (1983)

Returning to the Factory fold for a one-off interim release before moving on to their much lauded Some Bizzare / Virgin phase, ‘Yashar’ launched the more club friendly direction of CABARET VOLTAIRE. The single went down particularly well on the New York club scene. A track originally from their 1982 album ‘2X45’, it was extended and remixed to nearly eight minutes by John Robie who had worked with Arthur Baker on AFfrika Bamaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’.

Available on the compilation album ‘Of Factory New York’ (V/A) via Factory Benelux

https://www.facebook.com/CabaretVoltaireOfficial


SECTION 25 Looking From A Hilltop (1984)

In a change of direction where founder member Larry Cassidy stated “you can’t be a punk all your life”, Factory Records stalwarts SECTION 25 recruited vocalist Jenny Ross and keyboardist Angela Cassidy to go electro. Produced by Bernard Sumner and Donald Johnson, the clattering drum machine, accompanied by ominous synth lines and hypnotic sequenced modulations, dominated the mix of FAC108 to provide what was to become a much revered cult club classic.

Available on the album ‘From The Hip’ via Factory Benelux

http://www.section25.com


AD INFINITUM Telstar (1984)

This cover of ‘Telstar’ for FAC93 was rumoured to be NEW ORDER. This curio certainly had a number of distinct elements like the Hooky bass and the drum programming which recalled ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’. Peter Hook was indeed involved, as was Andy Connell who went on to form SWING OUT SISTER. Fronted by Lindsay Reade, her intended new lyrics for ‘Telstar’ were vetoed by The Joe Meek Estate, so a version with more abstract vocals was released instead.

Available on the compilation album ‘Fac Dance 02’ (V/A) via Strut Records

http://www.strut-records.com/Fac-Dance-2/


THE WAKE Talk About The Past (1984)

THE WAKE were what NEW ORDER would have continued to sound like had they not discovered the joys of the dancefloor. A dour Scottish four-piece who also had a female keyboard player Carolyn Allen, their music could be claustrophobic. ‘Talk About the Past’ however showed a brighter side with scratchy rhythm guitar, shiny synths, melodica flourishes and barely audible vocals. Featuring Vini Reilly of THE DURUTTI COLUMN on piano, FAC88 was their career highlight.

Available on THE WAKE album ‘Here Comes Everybody’ via Factory Benelux

http://factorybenelux.com/the_wake.html


MARCEL KING Reach For Love – New York Remix (1985)

Another Bernard Sumner’s production with Donald Johnson, ‘Reach For Love’ featured the late Marcel King, a member of vocal group SWEET SENSATION who won ‘New Faces’ and had a No1 with ‘Sad Sweet Dreamer’. A vibrant electro disco tune, HAPPY MONDAYS’ Shaun Ryder remarked that if this had been released on a label other than Factory, it would have been a hit! The beefier New York Remix was issued on a second 12 inch.

Available on the compilation album ‘Of Factory New York’ (V/A) via Factory Benelux

http://factorybenelux.com/of_factory_new_york_fbn55.html


SHARK VEGAS You Hurt Me (1986)

Mark Reeder was Factory Records’ German representative from 1978 to 1982. Reeder often sent records to Bernard Sumner from the emerging electronic club scenes around the world. His own Deutsche musical journey started with DIE UNBEKANNTEN, who mutated into SHARK VEGAS and delivered this Factory release. ‘You Hurt Me’ was produced by Sumner and characterised by the New York disco sequence programming that made NEW ORDER famous.

Available on the MARK REEDER album ‘Collaborator’ via Factory Benelux

http://www.5point1.org/


THE RAILWAY CHILDREN Brighter (1987)

Led by Gary Newby, THE RAILWAY CHILDREN showed promise by taking the more guitar driven aspects of NEW ORDER to the next level. Produced by ’Low-life’ engineer Michael Johnson, their second single ‘Brighter’ took a marimba sample and sequenced it as the backbone to a marvellous melodic number that could compete with THE SMITHS. However, despite releasing a full-length album on Factory, THE RAILWAY CHILDREN departed to Virgin Records.

Available on THE RAILWAY CHILDREN album ‘Reunion Wilderness’ via Ether

http://www.railwaychildren.co.uk/


THE DURUTTI COLUMN Otis (1988)

Having shown his atmospheric credentials with the beautiful ‘For Belgian Friends’ in 1980, the latest technology was perfect foil for the most Factory of the label’s artists Vini Reilly aka THE DURUTTI COLUMN. Finally convinced to stop singing, the instrumental ‘Vini Reilly’ album opened the musician’s texture palette with the dreamy ‘Otis’ being the pivotal track. Over a hypnotic sequence, samples of the late soul singer were flown in as Reilly improvised along on his six-string.

Available on THE DURUTTI COLUMN album ‘Vini Reilly’ via Kookydisc

http://www.thedurutticolumn.com


HAPPY MONDAYS WFL – Vince Clarke remix (1988)

With a name inspired by NEW ORDER’s ‘Blue Monday’, HAPPY MONDAYS would emerge as Factory’s other best-selling act although they began as something much more ordinary. But when they merged acid house with indie guitar rock, Shaun Ryder, Bez and Co would become flagbearers for the Ecstasy fuelled mini-movement known as ‘Baggy’ along with THE STONE ROSES. The Vince Clarke electronic remix of ‘Wrote For Luck’ from ‘Bummed’ aided the crossover process.

Available on the HAPPY MONDAYS album ‘Bummed’ via Rhino UK

http://www.happymondaysonline.com


ELECTRONIC Getting Away With It (1989)

Frustrated with the conflicts within NEW ORDER, Bernard Sumner planned a solo album. But on bumping into Johnny Marr who had just departed THE SMITHS, it became a collaborative project with the occasional guests. ELECTRONIC not just in name but also in nature, the first offering was the very PET SHOP BOYS-like ‘Getting Away With It’ featuring additional vocals and lyrics by Neil Tennant and a beautiful string arrangement by Anne Dudley.

Available on the ELECTRONIC album ‘Electronic’ via EMI Records

http://www.electronicband.com/


REVENGE Slave (1990)

The appropriately named REVENGE was Hooky’s response to ELECTRONIC but it was not well-received by the music press. A slightly messy track in its original album incarnation, the superior New York disco oriented single remix by Daddy-O also featured a surprise rap. It enhanced the song’s lyrical slant which with the well-documented joyless division between himself and Sumner, appears now to be a veiled attack on his bandmate. Hook’s project later morphed into MONACO.

Available on the REVENGE album ‘One True Passion V2.0’ via LTM Records

http://www.peterhook.co.uk


THE OTHER TWO Tasty Fish (1991)

the other twoNot to be left out of the NEW ORDER side project game, Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris formed the ironically named THE OTHER TWO. Amusingly titled after a Fish and Chip shop near Stockport, ‘Tasty Fish’ was a catchy electropop single with a confident vocal from Gilbert that should have been a hit. However, Factory was beginning to enter a state of turmoil by this point.

Available on THE OTHER TWO album ‘And You’ via LTM Records

http://theothertwo.co.uk/


CATH CARROLL Moves Like You (1991)

Previously a member of MIAOW, Cath Carroll was treated like a future star by Factory. Mixed by Martyn Phillips who had also worked with THE BELOVED, ‘Moves Like You’ was a fine example of the blissful house influenced pop of the period and could have been a major hit. With expensive studio and photo sessions lavished on her, she is often held up as a symbol of why Factory eventually collapsed.

Available on the CATH CARROLL album ‘England Made Me’ via LTM Records

http://www.ltmrecordings.com/cath_carroll.html


Dedicated to the memories of Larry Cassidy, Ian Curtis, Rob Gretton, Martin Hannett, Marcel King, Jenny Ross and Tony Wilson

Special thanks to James Nice at Factory Benelux

A varied selection of the Factory catalogue can be found on the 4CD box set ‘Factory Records: Communications 1978-92’ via Rhino Records

The DVD ‘Shadowplayers: Factory Records 1978-81’ directed by James Nice is released by LTM

http://factorybenelux.com/

http://www.factoryrecords.net/

http://factoryrecords.org/factory-records.php

http://cerysmaticfactory.info/index.php


Text by Chi Ming Lai
21st September 2015, updated 9th May 2020

An Evening with BERNARD SUMNER

Bernard Sumner - Chapter&Verse

Chapter & Verse – NEW ORDER, JOY DIVISION & Me

The history of JOY DIVISION and NEW ORDER is so fascinating, it is unsurprising that two films ’24 Hour Party People’ and ‘Control’ have been made using elements of those stories. However, those productions have been focussed around Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson and the short life of JOY DIVISION singer Ian Curtis respectively.

Books about the period meanwhile have been a plenty, starting with the Mark Johnson’s ‘An Ideal For Living – A History Of Joy Division & New Order’, progressing to Mick Middles’ ‘From Joy Division to New Order – The Factory Story’, ‘Touching From A Distance’ by Ian Curtis’ widow Deborah and more recently, ‘Unknown Pleasures’ by bass player Peter Hook.

But now, Bernard Sumner, a founder member of both iconic bands, has finally opened out to tell his side of the story with the publication of his memoirs entitled ‘Chapter & Verse – New Order, Joy Division & Me’. With luminaries present such as Daniel Miller and Arthur Baker, the NEW ORDER front man launched the book at a special event at London’s Waterstones book shop in Trafalgar Square with The Guardian’s Dave Simpson steering the conversation.

Sumner described it as containing “the stuff that matters” with “answers to questions that have never been asked”. While NEW ORDER’s hedonistic antics have been widely documented elsewhere, ‘Chapter & Verse – New Order, Joy Division & Me’ only touches on them. Instead, Sumner’s account is more personal and emotional. But it also contains his well-known sharpness and wit.

In the ensuing chat, Sumner reflected on his tough but happy childhood in Salford which he suggested had hardened him to overcome the tragic events that were to follow. This inevitably led to a discussion on the late Ian Curtis; Sumner had attempted hypnotic regression to persuade the enigmatic JOY DIVISION singer to escape his death wish in the weeks before his suicide.

This session was recorded on cassette and has been transcribed as an appendix for the book… it does not make easy reading but it is a intriguing historical document that puts into further context, the mindset of Ian Curtis. “It was my feeble attempt to try and unlock something that might be causing him all the troubles he was having” Sumner added. But Curtis is remembered by his friend as “a good guy” who woke up “from a dream only to find that the dream was actually happening” and that “love was literally tearing him apart”.

Interestingly, although having now spent almost 37 years in the business, Sumner confessed he was not into music until his late teens but the change came via the emotive Ennio Morricone soundtracks of the Sergio Leone directed Spaghetti Westerns such as ‘The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly’, ‘For A Few Dollars More’ and ‘Once A Upon A Time In The West’.

Anyone who has listened closely to ‘Elegia’, ‘Ruined In A Day’ or even ‘Blue Monday’ will recognise how these soundscapes helped shape NEW ORDER’s aural template plus of course, the band have been taking to the stage accompanied by the haunting melancholy of ‘The Ecstacy Of Gold’. On the profound effect these movies had on him, Sumner pointed out “what had gone before was corny John Wayne films, the Indians were bad and the cowboys were good! Suddenly, you had these weird Italian Western films that were shot in a spectacular way and EVERYONE in the film was bad, no-one was good!”

In the corresponding open Q&A with the attentive and appreciative audience, Sumner hinted as to the direction of the new NEW ORDER album with good news for anyone who may have been disappointed by ‘Get Ready’ and ‘Waiting For The Sirens’ Call’; “It’s quite electronic in nature” he announced.

On why the more recent NEW ORDER albums had been more guitar focussed, he commented that at the start of the noughties, electronic music had become “a bit too compartmentalised for my tastes… you couldn’t just write a good electronic song, it had to be about what genre it was, and that ‘you can’t play that piano sound, it’s not allowed anymore! You can’t use that beat’… so when you start applying these kinds of rules to music, it becomes boring”.

But he said: “electronic music has become more open and free” and after his break from synthesizers, he had “fallen in love with them again”.

There were also clues as to the form the artwork would take with the news that the legendary Peter Saville would be on board as with NEW ORDER’s other albums. “Peter’s got more and more minimalist… one of the ideas is to put a simple line across the album… but in nice colours!” quipped Sumner to laughter from the audience. But apparently when Sumner met up with Saville a few weeks later to green light the concept, the perfectionist graphic design icon apparently said: “yeah, I’ve been thinking about getting rid of the line!”. Chuckling away, Sumner told everyone: “You should see his business card, you need a magnifying glass to read it!”

An Evening with BERNARD SUMNER01

Before the Q&A though, Sumner concluded the main part of the evening with a few words about his estranged former band mate Peter Hook, the departure of whom is discussed in greater detail within the book. Asked if it was strange to carry on as NEW ORDER without the Bass Viking, Sumner sheepishly replied: “It would have been stranger carrying on with Hooky! We didn’t get rid of Hooky, he decided to go. I hope he’s happy in what he’s doing… even though he called me a c*nt!”

Overall, ‘Chapter & Verse – New Order, Joy Division & Me’ is a good, informative read with an endearing, self-deprecating sense of humour. Considering that Sumner has had to face the premature passing of close friends such as Ian Curtis, Ruth Polsky, Martin Hannett, Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson, that he has been able to maintain such positivity over the years is a considerable achievement. And with NEW ORDER having signed to Mute Records, the story continues into its next phase. Whatever happens now, it’s just ‘A Means To An End’. After all, Sumner has already crammed more into his life than most people have twenty times over.

In book’s postscript, Sumner notes: “This book is about what it means to be truly alive. It’s about operating outside the system and beating it. It’s about surviving catastrophe. It’s about hanging on to some of the things you once valued as a kid and how, along with that, just having fun can lead to – and in fact is – success. You just have to take a few steps back from life occasionally to see things how they ought to be”.

Trivia fact from the evening: The song ‘1963’ was named so because it rhymed with the word “January”!


BERNARD SUMNER ‘Chapter & Verse: New Order, Joy Division & Me’ is published by Bantam Press

http://www.neworder.com/

https://www.facebook.com/NewOrderOfficial

http://www.neworderonline.com/


Text and photos by Chi Ming Lai
3rd October 2014

MARK REEDER Interview

Renowned remixer Mark Reeder’s first flirtation with near fame was when he was in punk band THE FRANTIC ELEVATORS with SIMPLY RED’s Mick Hucknall.

In 1978, he moved to Berlin and became Factory Records German representative in Germany while also working in the studio with bands such as all-girl avant noise terrorists MALARIA! who he co-managed and DIE TOTEN HOSEN.

In 1981, Reeder formed post-punk duo DIE UNBEKANNTEN while in 1983, he helped put together the Berlin Special of ‘The Tube’ TV music show which featured acts such as DIE ÄRTZE. Later on, DIE UNBEKANNTEN changed their name to SHARK VEGAS and toured Europe with NEW ORDER.

In 1990, Reeder established his own electronic dance music record label Masterminded For Success (MFS) and discovered Paul Van Dyk who he guided into becoming an internationally famed DJ and recording artist. His passionate approach and highly respected reputation for care and attention in all areas including concept, artwork, PR and sound gained many notable admirers within the music industry. So when Reeder focused on remixing in the late noughties, he was given the opportunity to work for a number of major artists including John Foxx and PET SHOP BOYS.

He also collaborated with popular German dance duo BLANK & JONES on a musical restyling project entitled ‘Reordered’ which featured among its vocalists NEW ORDER’s Bernard Sumner, Robert Smith from THE CURE, Steve Kilbey of THE CHURCH and Claudia Brücken. Its highlights however were probably the ‘This Time Of Night’ aping Alone In The Dark Mix of ‘Loneliness’ sung by Bobo and the Save Yourself Mix of ‘Manifesto’ featuring Vanessa Daou.

Reeder is about to release his brand new labour of love entitled ‘Five Point One’. It is a dream compilation album of new, rare and unreleased remixes by his own hand of established heavyweights such as DEPECHE MODE, PET SHOP BOYS, BLANK & JONES and BAD LIEUTENANT alongside cult favourites DIE TOTEN HOSEN and Anne Clark plus comparative newbies like MARSHEAUX, MAY 68, NOBLESSE OBLIGE and ELECTROBELLE.

Comprising of a deluxe DVD and 2CD package, the DVD is remastered in Dolby 5.1 surround sound to create a listening experience to enhance the depth and radiance of the original stereo mixes. What shines through particularly is Reeder’s intuitive approach which adds a developmental enhancement to proceedings while retaining the all important compositional essence of the originals.

Mark Reeder kindly spoke about ‘Five Point One’ and added a few thoughts about the welcome return of the song in modern electronic pop plus some stories about his days with Factory Records… “anything can happen in the next half hour…”

Photo by Katja Ruge

What was your inspiration particularly for this compilation?

I’ve always been a fan of surround technology and love the idea of multi-dimensional cinematic wrap-around sound. Although I’ve never owned a Quad system I have Quad versions from the 60s and 70s of ‘Switched-On Bach’ by Wendy Carlos (she was called Walter back then) and ‘Quadrophenia’ by THE WHO and I released a couple of B.A.S.E super spacial stereo and surround albums on my MFS label too.

So making my own 5.1 album was, I suppose, a natural process. I confess, I was definitely inspired by the 5.1 releases of PINK FLOYD, DAVID BOWIE and DEPECHE MODE, which I immediately snapped up.

However, making a 5.1 mix is a complex and expensive undertaking. I first made a 5.1 mix for my remix of ‘German Film Star’ for The PET SHOP BOYS and Sam Taylor-Wood and one for ‘Sink or Swim’ for BAD LIEUTENANT and then ‘Underpass’ for John FOxx, then followed MARSHEAUX and we just went from there. The idea that the album was to have some of my all-time fave bands and all my remixes for them together on one 5.1 surround album just started to happen. It was initially intended to be an audio only album, but when John Foxx said I could use his original 80s video, then we also had a visual element to the album too.

You’ve remixed the songs in DVD 5.1 Surround sound for one disc, how did you the motivate yourself for this endeavour?

The motivation was the challenge. Micha Adam, my studio partner and I wanted to see if we could do it. We wanted to push our own boundaries and test our abilities. Our aim was to re-remix our remixes in 5.1 surround and hopefully release them on one album. Most people, especially in the music industry, currently can’t see the reason behind making a 5.1 album, but that is because there is not that much 5.1 music about and nothing to really compare it with and therefore no visible market for it. That’s most probably because of the cost involved, not only in making a 5.1 mix, but for the consumer too.

It is early days still and just a matter of time. Once the technology gets cheaper and 5.1 becomes easier to make then more music will emerge. It took stereo over 30 years to reach the household in the late 60s and when 5.1 systems eventually become cheap and affordable, then people will also want something to play on them.

Also new and futuristic technological developments aim to make 5.1 available on every mobile phone too. That was another inspiration. Once we all have the 5.1 DolbyMobile chip in our smartphones then we will want to hear music in 5.1 too, which was a further driving force for us. This special chip means that you can listen to music in 5.1 on your phone, on normal stereo headphones, albeit in simulated 5.1, but if you connect your phone to a real 5.1 sound system, it will play back in true 5.1 surround. Fascinating!

Making the actual 5.1 remixes was the real challenge though, as it is all about getting the balance right so that the mix sounds like the original remix, but the music comes from all around you, just like in the cinema. That was the thrill. Yet, mixing an album in surround is not as easy as you might think and the end result will probably sound a bit different to everyone, especially considering that each home system is set up individually to taste. By the way, mixing a track in stereo is much easier too, as you can layer and hide things within the mix, whereas surround is much more revealing.

You are featuring several new acts on ‘Five Point One’ such as MARSHEAUX and NOBLESSE OBLIGE alongside established luminaries such as PET SHOP BOYS, DEPECHE MODE and John Foxx. I can see the newer artists being very co-operative but how straightforward was it to persuade the established acts to allow you to rework their material with your instrumentation and methods?

Yes, I’ve tried to create a balance between the more established acts and a crop of newer artists. Some of which have their debut on ‘Five Point One’. I thought this way I could bring them to a wider audience.

Generally, I think I’ve been very very lucky, as it wasn’t really all that difficult for me to obtain the clearances, as it might have been for other people. The artists that I have initially done the remixes for know who I am and obviously respect me and my work and my idea. They appreciate the amount of time, dedication and creativity that has gone into preparing this project. I guess they know I would also try and do my best and that I would take great care remixing their song. They also know the kind of music that I make.

Mind you, remixing a well-known and legendary song like ‘Underpass’ was still very nerve wracking. I’ve always loved this song and getting the chance to remix it for the first time after 30 years was such an honour. At first I was elated, then came the feeling of fear! Naturally, I wanted to do it justice without destroying it too much, as these days it seems so simple to take a great track, whack it into Ableton and strip it of all its atmosphere and identity, then add a techno beat and scatter a sprinkling of the original vocal over it, so it becomes totally unrecognisable and in most cases, disappointing.

I really don’t make my remixes like that. I’m old school. I like to still be able to hear the song, but give it my own signature and atmosphere, while at the same time use as many of the original elements as possible.

Luckily, John really liked my ‘Underpass’ remixes and he was very cooperative. In fact all the artists and labels were. Making a remix for a well-known song though is definitely much more daunting than making a remix for a new song. The obvious comparison aspect is overwhelming and the expectation is so great.

Obviously, I know I could never ever better the original and I don’t try to, I just make my interpretation. I also understand that my remixes won’t appeal to everyone, but I really only make a remix in the hope the artist themselves will like it and I suppose in the end, it’s for all those people who do actually like it. If you don’t like it then that’s fine too, just don’t listen to it. I always strive as much as I can to at least give the song I’m going to remix, the respect it deserves, regardless of its status.

Remixing ‘Sweetest Perfection’ was also very precarious. Daniel Miller gave me the chance to remix ‘Sweetest Perfection’ for the last DEPECHE MODE remixes album, but due to family problems I was unable to complete it on time. So I asked if I could use it on my own remixes album. My DEPECHE MODE remix actually took the longest to clear, simply because EMI / Mute were in the process of releasing their own DEPECHE MODE remixes album.

You also feature cult singer/songwriter Anne Clark who worked with John Foxx in 1985. For those who have not heard of her, how would describe her music and why do you like it?

It is quite interesting the threads between the artists on the album, in some obscure way they are all connected. I think Anne is very unique. She is a poet, who sets her poems to music. Although she is from England, she is probably more well-known outside of the UK. Her legendary status was formed in the early 80s and her brilliant song ‘Sleeper in Metropolis’ was huge in the new wave clubs across Europe at that time. It eventually became a Goth anthem and inspiration for many to follow. Its analogue synth sequencer sounds have never been bettered. Of course, her music today is very delicate but still powerful and anyone who has seen her perform live, knows exactly how beautiful her music is. I remixed two of her songs off ‘The Smallest Acts of Kindness’album which I really liked. I was inspired. They were intended for a remixes album, but that album hasn’t yet materialised and so they are now on mine. I really like this spoken word matched with music idea.

You’re credited with introducing Bernard Sumner to Giorgio Moroder and Italo disco through the cassettes you used to send him from Berlin. How do you feel about his more rocky material with BAD LIEUTENANT? And is featuring remixes of them a way of you putting Bernard back into that electronic dance thing that he does so well but rarely touches now?

Well, I know Bernard is still very much into electronics and club music and he promised there will be more to be heard on the next BL album, but he wanted to show a different side with BAD LIEUTENANT and distance his band from NEW ORDER, which is understandable. I thought their album was really excellent. I’m not just saying that because Bernard is a friend, but because I really think it is. It is a bit of an unpolished jewel. Anyway, I played it to death. I think it was a very optimistic album and if you give it the chance, it gets better every time you play it.

Anyway, Bernard asked me to film some sequences for their ‘Sink Or Swim’ video and then I was asked if I wanted to do a remix for it too. I thought there are probably a few fans out there, like myself and Micha, who would also like to hear a more electronic, dancier type version of the song. So I made one. The same goes for my remix for the PET SHOP BOYS. They also wanted a more traditional PSB sounding remix without having to return to that style themselves.

Then Bernard asked me if I could do a quick remix for ‘Twist of Fate’, which was a track I also really liked and wanted to remix. I made two variations, one is a heavy-ish sounding half tempo mix with a pulsating bass and the other is a more uptempo dance mix variation. Both mixes are featured on ‘Five Point One’. I thought Steve Young made a truly brilliant sci-fi puppet video for that track too, with very scary looking puppets. You can see the love, care and dedication he has put into making this Gerry Anderson inspired video and I wanted to applaud his work and so we feature the video on the DVD too. He was kind enough to recut his video and add newly created footage just so that it would fit to my 5.1 remix.

Making these BAD LIEUTENANT remixes was much more difficult than we had imagined, as all the songs were played-in live by the band and there was lots of natural speeding up and slowing down within the track, which you don’t usually get with a precise timed 4/4 techno record. I had a great time with Micha making these two remixes, as we had to slice every single word and every note of every instrument and move them into position by hand to make them still sound organic, which took forever. It was good practise, as it turned out, because the BAD LIEUTENANT remixes were still easier than making the DEPECHE MODE or TOTEN HOSEN remixes.

Your Lange Hosen remix of DIE TOTEN HOSEN’s ‘Disco’ was very interesting. You go back a long way with them. They are known as being a punk band, but when did it occur to you that their material could be tailored for the dancefloor?

Actually, I realised that their music could be tailored for the dancefloor back in the 80s with ‘Hip Hop Bommi Bop’, which they made with legendary New York rapper Fab Five Freddy.

We used to listen to a lot of disco music on tour mixed in with AC/DC and plenty of punk classics. It just seemed natural to me that their track ‘Disco’ should have a real Italo-rock-disco-esque sounding remix.

As usual, I wanted to retain as much of their original song as possible though, so that it is still recognisable as a TOTEN HOSEN song. So the guitars and vocals are all in there. I’ve just changed the tempo and groove and added a straight driving bass guitar and pulsating synth so it can be played in a proper disco type of disco.

You’ve worked with MALARIA! in the past and there was a collaboration with CHICKS ON SPEED a few years back of 1981’s ‘Kaltes Klares Wasser’. Could their material work on the contemporary dancefloor and have you ever considered remixing them?

Yes, I did briefly consider it, but then again I didn’t just want to have a kind of oldies only album. I wanted a mixture of established artists and new ones. I wanted to give the unknown artists the opportunity to be on an album with some very well-known ones.

Was there any track that you really wanted on ‘Five Point One’ but were unable to use due to the usual contractual stuff?

Yes, there was. I really wanted to include my remix of ‘A Forest’ on ‘Five Point One’ that I made for the ‘Reordered’ album. In fact, I already made a 5.1 mix of it in the hope that I could use it, but unfortunately, BLANK & JONES said they couldn’t license it to me due to their strict contractual obligations with Robert Smith. So that particular remix remains exclusively available on ‘Reordered’ in normal stereo.

Are there any particular favourites for you on this compilation?

Yes, tracks 1-25.

Who do you hope ‘Five Point One’ will appeal to?

I guess it’s for all those people who like the artists featured on the album and wish they were all on one album. Now they are. Then it is also for those who enjoy this kind of retro sounding synthpop style of music and it’s especially for all those with a thirst for 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound. For the moment, it seems only major label artists like DEPECHE MODE, KING CRIMSON, DAVID BOWIE, PINK FLOYD or THE MOODY BLUES have been able to release surround albums.

I thought why can’t my favourite artists also have a 5.1 release too? I wanted to put all my own remixes for some of my favourite bands together on one 5.1 album. After all, who wouldn’t like an album that featured new mixes for legends like DEPECHE MODE and PET SHOP BOYS as well as John Foxx and Anne Clark all together on one album and all in 5.1? I certainly would.

How do you think electronic pop music has been developing over the years and where do you see it heading in the future?

After 20 years of electronically driven techno, trance and the many derivatives spawned from it, I feel that the current style of electronic pop music is quite refreshing. Of course, club music will always be there in one form or another and DJs and dancing will never go out of fashion. But for myself, I’m really enjoying hearing artists making songs again. Maybe in the future the synthpop sound will finally have its renaissance, one that it so rightly deserves. It seems more and more people are yearning for it. After all, the 80s appear to represent a time not only of political balance and security but of experimentation in fashion and music.

Back in the 80s, synth music was mainly European and futuristic sounding, but the overwhelming influence of major label funded American rock music was able to stamp synthpop into the ground. Also the synth technology sadly had its limitations too, I remember back then our Moog and Korg synths were terribly temperamental when it came to temperature or humidity change.

Today synth music is much easier to produce. We are living in that future, now. So why not make 80s sounding futuristic music? What I find interesting today is the current mixture of retro sounds of old synths being played in a contemporary way. I suppose the availability of new software for long forgotten analogue synths and the amazing technical plug-ins which have been getting better and better, all help to form the current sound of the music. All I know and care about really, is that there have been some great songs and cool new artists emerging recently and that is very inspiring.

Is there a favourite story you can tell from your days as Factory’s German representative?

Many. I remember Rob Gretton sent me a huge roll of posters to promote the first NEW ORDER album in Germany. To save on postage because the roll was so bloody big and heavy, he sent them by land and not airmail… well, they eventually arrived, three months later!

There are many funny stories and this interview would be longer than my Myspace page if I told them all. What many people don’t realise is that it was very difficult trying to promote Factory’s records in Germany back in the late 70s and early 80s. No one really wanted to know. This was due to the fact that Germany was rediscovering its own musical ability and creating its own new wave scene.

Early German punkbands like TEMPO, PVC or DAF had been fuelled by the UK punk movement, they in turn paved the way for the alternative avant-garde like MANIA-D, P1/E, DER PLAN or EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN and later, the more commercial new wave pap like NINA HAGEN, SPLIFF or IDEAL. No one was particularly interested in a small indie label from Manchester and certainly not in a miserable sounding band called JOY DIVISION.

Sure, there was some interest from the dedicated anglophiles but it was very small and it appealed to a few. Of course, this attitude changed somewhat when Ian died.

Have you heard SECTION 25’s new single ‘Colour, Movement, Sex And Violence’ which is released on Peter Hook’s Fac51 The Haçienda label? What do you think of the spirit of Factory Records being kept alive and kicking?

Yes, I have heard it and I think it’s a great tune. Love it. Very Manchester. I’ve always enjoyed SECTION 25 and this song is one of their best in ages. The spirit of Factory will be kept alive by the numerous fans of the sound the label had and by the new fans who are discovering it for the first time. Without Factory, the Manchester music scene wouldn’t be what it became and is today and most boys would probably still not know how to dance. In Germany, Strut have just released a new ‘Factory Dance’ 12″ double CD compilation, which introduces some of the lesser known Factory dance artists together with a few better known ones. It has very striking looking artwork and is a must-have for any Factory fan.

What are your own upcoming plans after Five Point One?

I plan to release a remastered version of DIE UNBEKANNTEN’s ‘Don’t Tell Me Stories’ album finally on CD, this might include some SHARK VEGAS tracks too and also in 2012, I hope to release a deluxe version of DIE VISION’s ‘Torture’, the last album to be recorded in communist East Berlin that I produced there in 1989. As for my own projects, now that would be telling wouldn’t it?


ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its sincerest thanks to Mark Reeder

‘Five Point One’ is released on 25th November 2011 by Kennan Limited and distributed in Germany by Rough Trade Deutschland.

For more information on Five Point One including the full tracklisting and how to order this deluxe 2CD/DVD set, please visit http://www.five-point-one.co.uk/

https://www.facebook.com/markreedermusic/

https://twitter.com/markreedermfs


Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
21st November 2011

STEPHEN MORRIS Interview

Photo by Trevor Key

In 1977, Stephen Morris answered a small ad for a drummer placed by a punk band named WARSAW. The story goes that when he met Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook outside Strangeways Prison, he thought Hooky was Sumner’s dad!

They soon changed their name to JOY DIVISION and influenced by THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, Iggy Pop and David Bowie, refined their sound into a more intense industrial art rock that all but invented Goth. Under the management guidance of Rob Gretton, they soon came to the attention of Tony Wilson, TV personality and impresario of Factory Records after Curtis called him a c*** before one of their gigs!

JOY DIVISION’s first album ‘Unknown Pleasures’ was released in 1979 and gained plaudits the world over with many hailing it as one of the best debut albums of all time. Although largely a guitar based record produced by the wayward genius of Martin Hannett and seasoned with his AMS Digital Delay, it was also notable for Morris’ use of electronic percussion effects on tracks such as ‘Insight’ and ‘She’s Lost Control’. “I’d always wanted to be a drum machine” said Morris, commenting on his very clean and precise drumming style.

Developing at a ferocious rate and adding further layered grandeur, the glorious ‘Atmosphere’ showcased an increasing interest in synthesizers and technology which then deeply coloured their 1980 follow-up ‘Closer’. However, the world knows what happened next and the haunting delivery of Ian Curtis matched with the beautiful sonic architecture of ‘Closer’ only substantiated the eventual myth and legacy of JOY DIVISION. Reconvening in late 1980, Morris, Hook and Sumner chose the name NEW ORDER as a symbol of their fresh start

After deciding against recruiting a new vocalist, they took turns at singing in rehearsals. Interestingly, it was Morris’ voice that was considered the best but with his distaste for singing drummers like “Phil Collins and him out of The Eagles”, duties initially fell to both Sumner and Hook. To complete the line-up, Morris’ girlfriend and later wife, Gillian Gilbert was recruited on keyboards and guitar. Around this time, Morris also took to playing synths himself.

Although already fans of electronic music through Ian Curtis’ love of KRAFTWERK’s ‘Trans-Europe Express’, horizons were expanding in many ways for NEW ORDER with exposure to the New York dance scene, Giorgio Moroder and Italo disco. Morris purchased his first drum machine and used it to pulse the sequencer-like patterns that dominated their transitional singles ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ and ‘Temptation’.

But it was the necessitated replacement of all their original equipment after it was stolen in 1982 during a tour of America that the technical dance revolution began. Into the synthesizer arsenal came the Prophet5, its corresponding Polysequencer with its mini cassette data dump and the Emulator sampler while most crucially on the percussion side came the Oberheim DMX digital drum computer.

It was while they were getting to grips with this incumbent technology and driven by the need to compose a track which could play itself for encores that ‘Blue Monday’ came about. Based on an earlier 20 minute composition entitled ‘Prime 586’ (later released as ‘Video 586’) which was used on the opening night of Factory’s iconic club The Ha­cienda, its rhythmical stutter was the accidental result of Morris trying to recreate the drum patterns of Donna Summer’s ‘Our Love’ on the DMX! The resultant seven and a half minute track which John Peel dubbed “Pink Floyd go disco” was housed in a stark Peter Saville designed sleeve based on the 5 inch floppy disc used by the Emulator. It became the biggest selling 12 inch single of all time.

The rest as they say is history and NEW ORDER’s contribution to electronic dance music continued with singles such as ‘Confusion’, ‘Thieves Like Us’, ‘The Perfect Kiss’, ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ and ‘Round & Round’. The ‘England’s Dreaming’ writer Jon Savage said “it was incredible that this very dark gloomy gothic rock group became disco divas”.

However, during a hiatus between the ‘Technique’ and ‘Republic’ albums, Morris and Gilbert embarked on their own project, ironically named THE OTHER TWO in response to Sumner’s ELECTRONIC and Hooky’s REVENGE. Their 1991 debut single ‘Tasty Fish’ was a wonderful slice of female fronted electropop but the failure of Factory Records to get the CD single into the shops despite radio airplay contributed to the song stalling at No41. What was not known at the time though was that Factory was on the brink of collapse so THE OTHER TWO’s first long player ‘And You’ wasn’t released until late 1993 as part of the deal which saw NEW ORDER sign to London Records.

Morris and Gilbert married in 1994 but there was a long break before NEW ORDER got back together in 1998 for some triumphant comeback shows at Manchester Apollo and the Reading Festival which also featured JOY DIVISION numbers such as ‘Heart & Soul’, ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Isolation’. THE OTHER TWO released a second album called ‘Superhighways’ in 1999 but not long after, Gillian Gilbert formally left NEW ORDER for family reasons. The remaining trio continued but after two primarily rock based albums ‘Get Ready’ and ‘Waiting For The Sirens’ Call’, NEW ORDER appeared to have called it a day for good.

Hooky has since taken ‘Unknown Pleasures’ out on a live tour of the world while Sumner has formed BAD LIEUTENANT with Morris joining him on the drum stool. Meanwhile, following all the renewed interest in JOY DIVISION from the Anton Corbijn directed biopic ‘Control’, Morris has also been involved in the remastering process for the lavish vinyl boxed set ‘+- : Singles 1976-1980’.

Continuing ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s series of interviews with drummers involved in the development of electronic pop music, Stephen Morris gives a fascinating and amusing insight into how he harnessed new technology with not just one but two of the most important bands from the post punk era. He also adds his thoughts on the disastrous NEW ORDER deluxe remasters, the state of the music industry and the possibility of Susan Boyle covering JOY DIVISION!

What inspired you to get your first synth drum?

Getting the first synth drum, it was a bit of confusion actually! *laughs*

On the cover of the British version of CAN’s ‘Tago Mago’, behind the drummer there’s this thing which I now know is an amplifier! But when I was young, we used to wonder what this was before we knew how groups worked and what gear was. We thought about it and we came up with the conclusion that it must be a drum synthesizer because that must be how Jaki Liebezeit got those sounds. That’s what convinced me that I must have one.

When I actually saw one, I think it was a Synare I in a music shop in Manchester. What I really liked about it was that it had a handle… it was like a suitcase and the fact that it had a handle, I thought that was cool because you could carry this thing about. When I actually got a drum synthesizer, it was the Synare III.

Is that the one in Kevin Cummins’ book?

Yes, and it just made disco sounds… y’know “booo-booooo”! *laughs*

I used that sound on ‘Insight’ and spent a lot of time trying to find other sounds that you could get out of it! It was alright but it was quite difficult to twiddle the knobs and play drums at the same time. And also, I didn’t quite understand how a Moog ladder filter worked which is why when you listen to bootlegs of ‘Insight’… basically you’d krank the resonance up and it would turn into tweeting birds for these weird freak out breaks but of because of this filter, the volume went up by 10!

So yeah, in a lot of bootlegs, that’s all you can hear! I cringe nowadays but I could only turn one knob. I couldn’t turn up the resonance and turn down the volume so I was hoping someone else would turn it down!

Photo by Kevin Cummins

Was it your synth drum that made those quite vicious Native American attacks on tracks like ‘Interzone’ and ‘The Sound Of Music’?

No! That’s Ian making those noises! They were Ian’s vocal techniques! The unusual noise that I like the best is on ‘Atrocity Exhibition’. By then, I had a Synare III and a Simmons SDSVI so we got the Synare out and put it through this horrible fuzz box… we used to do a track of stuff and not listen to the music. There’s noises like a pig being slaughtered… that was me!

The two versions of ‘She’s Lost Control’ are quite different, but both their rhythmical templates were quite significant in the development of the JOY DIVISION sound. So how did your percussion parts on the ‘Unknown Pleasures’ version come about?

That was using the Synare to do the “tschak-tschak” noises and it was supposed to be like a Phil Spector thing, not playing a snare drum like a snare drum. That’s what the idea of that one was.

Are those electronic toms or was that your acoustic ones being put through one of producer Martin Hannett’s boxes?

The idea with Martin with drums was he just wanted complete separation because he wanted to process every bit of the drum kit separately. That’s why he made you play every drum one at a time. The Marshall Time Modulator was what we used a lot to make them not really sound like toms, it kind of sounded really dead like “plomp-plomp-plomp” noises!

How did you find working with Martin Hannett? Did he really ask you to play “faster but slower”?

Yes! You just get used to it, you have to be in a kind of ‘Zen’ frame of mind! *laughs*

With our stuff, it was ok because I knew what I was doing and that was alright. But I did a session with him for John Cooper-Clarke and it was the same sort of deal.

Because I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to be doing, I just got really frustrated… I just kept breaking sticks, drumheads and everything because it was “what the hell does he want me to do now?”, I just got really angry! Not with Martin, but you start hitting things very hard and vent your spleen! He wasn’t impressed!

Why did you record a second version of ‘She’s Lost Control’?

Why did we re-record it? Because the thing at the time was the 12 inch disco single, which sounds daft when you say it now. But it was a thing in itself and you could make the record really loud and dynamic. That was what we wanted to do with ‘She’s Lost Control’, but we had ‘Atmosphere’ on the other side which spoiled it because that has to be the most un-disco song going! But that was the idea of doing a 12 inch. It was kind of a really big drum fest thing and it’s all real drums as in the Synare did most of it. And the aerosol…

So the clip in ‘Control’ depicting you and the aerosol can during the recording of that is true?

Yes, that was a true story… that one actually happened! *laughs*

It was absolutely stupid like, because it’s just playing one of those “tschak-tschak” Synare parts and Martin made me go into a vocal booth with a can of tape head cleaner which is highly flammable and poisonous! So I’m in this confined space that’s slowly filling up and I come out of it in completely dazed… if I’d had lit a cigarette, that whole place would have gone up!

The influence of CAN’s Jaki Liebezeit is quite apparent in JOY DIVISION but on ‘Closer’, things like ‘Isolation, ‘Decades’ and ‘The Eternal’ had quite electronically derived rhythms. How did the shift take place and how involved were you in creating those sounds?

‘Closer’ is the album where I think I’m probably most proud of the drumming because it’s really good, that is what I wanted to do. On ‘Unknown Pleasures’, it was a bit of a punky crossover thing on it. When we did ‘Closer’, I found my niche… it was kind of a disco tribal thing, really happy with the drumming on that. I would have loved to have done more of it because when we got to NEW ORDER, I made a conscious decision not to do that anymore! *laughs*

We had Martin’s ARP2600 and the sequencer that goes with it on ‘The Eternal’, there’s a f*** up in the middle of it and you couldn’t drop in so we left it and it sounds like I’ve done it but was a machine!

And there was our CR78 nightmare… have you ever tried programming one? Me and Martin, we were very keen on smoking pot and we hired one in for ‘Decades’. There was this very small black rubber pad, you put that into the programming thing, “press programme switch while holding… “, it’s just a mad Roland thing and it doesn’t make any sense! We spent the best part of a day trying to programme this bloody thing… I couldn’t do it and he couldn’t do it. In the end we just used the bossa nova thing on it. It wasn’t fun, but I think it was the only time I’ve seen Martin as baffled as me! *laughs*

Photo by Anton Corbijn

Do you think JOY DIVISION would have ended up sounding how NEW ORDER eventually sounded?

To a certain extent, yes. We were going down that road with ‘Closer’ because we were using a lot more synthesizers and using them in a more rhythmic way. It would have been like that, but possibly not quite as disco!

Was that Bernard with his Italo disco records?

It was all of us. The NEW ORDER Italian disco thing, it was a friend of Bernard’s, because everybody did cassettes. We’d drive in the car listening to these cassettes and it was either Kiss FM from New York or these bloody Italian disco things! We thought it would be great to do something like this, but we’d no idea how to go about it. *laughs*

What was your first drum machine?

It was just after ‘Closer’ that I got the first affordable programmable drum machine, the Boss Dr Rhythm DR55 and that was on the early NEW ORDER stuff like ‘Truth’… I think there’s even a version of ‘In A Lonely Place’ we did with the drum machine, it didn’t work out too well *laughs*

I really liked the sound of drum boxes like the Minipops, the CR78 and the old Wurlitzer ones. They make you think of a weird place; it’s not quite science fiction, it’s not disco, they’re old but new! It’s a bit like a 1950s film, the vibe I get off them. I love the ones that don’t sound like drums, I like their crude attempts at Latin percussion.

You started playing keyboards around this time. What inspired you to do this, were you getting bored of drums at this point?

I wasn’t bored, it was that we had to be different. The hardest thing in the world is to be different, it’s not easy! The thing about NEW ORDER is we never know what we’re doing, but we know what we don’t want to do. It’s by avoiding other things you don’t want to do, that you end up at what you do want to do!

Did I want play keyboards? I’m the world’s most reluctant keyboard player, I didn’t really want to but it happened early on because there was just the three of us. It just happened that Bernard can’t sing and play guitar at the same time, Hooky can’t sing and play bass, and I just can’t sing playing anything!

So I ended up playing keyboards. We got the ARP Omni towards the end of JOY DIVISION for ‘Closer’ after using an ARP Solina earlier. So I ended up playing that with the drum machine on top. So there was me playing keyboards and switching patterns on the Dr Rhythm and they laughed at me for saying I should write down these patterns on a piece of paper… they didn’t know what was coming a few years down the line!

Was it this drum machine that clocked into the ARP to get the pulsing thing you had on ‘Everything’s Gone Green’?

That’s right, although there wasn’t much potential of that with the Omni, it was when we got the ARP Quadra that you could do that. It was taking the trigger out of the drum machine and bunging it into the ‘trigger in’.

Did you design a circuit box to step up the pulse in order to do that?

No, it was just plugging a lead in! Eventually we did with other equipment and a lot of that stuff. We were lucky because Martin had a friend, Martin Usher who was an electronics genius, he was absolutely fantastic. Whenever he was around, nothing would ever break down.

At one point, we took him to Australia just in case the gear broke down and it never did. But as soon as you sent him away, it broke down again! He helped a lot. He sorted out the box to step it up when we moved on after the Dr Rhythm. There was a home organ company called Clef in Bramhall down the road who had a thing called a Master Rhythm which was a rip-off of the Dr Rhythm! We got that modified so you could get a separate audio out of each sound and we needed that box to step it up to trigger. It had loads of switches on it so you could switch the triggers on and off.

Everyone talks about ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ being a sequencer number but it wasn’t really?

No, with ‘Everything’s Gone Green’, you had a Moog Source doing a 1/16th pulse and the Quadra doing the “da-dah, da-da-dah”. Then what you’d do is take the ‘CV’ out of the Quadra and take that into the Moog so that the Moog is playing a different rhythm but following the pitch of the other thing. That’s what we used for ‘Temptation’ as well.

So the track that eventually became ‘Video 586’ was your turning point into actually using a sequencer?That’s right, Bernard and Martin Usher built a Powertran 1024 Sequencer. The Powertran Transcendent 2000 was the first JOY DIVISION synth; fantastic kit synth, there’s a guy in Australia started doing a rack mount of them, but he’s never finished it.

I’d love to get one of them, I keep checking on his website… it’s Chris Huggett, the guy who went on and did EDP who made Wasps and had some vague EMS connection in the dawn of cheap British synthesizers! Have you ever seen the sequencer? You’ve got two rows of knobs which have got numbers on which come up in a numeric display.

You used the knobs to put in the start / stop addresses and they’re all in kind of decimal. And then you’ve this LED thermometer-like display which I eventually worked out was actually showing what the pitch was, but in hexadecimal… we used to have these stoned conversations about what hexadecimal meant!! The thing was you had to be very precise about what you put in the start / stop addresses because if you got it wrong, you got a completely different tune! And we got a few tunes that way! *laughs*

It was absolute murder to use live, you couldn’t see! It was like cracking a safe! God knows how Gillian and Bernard did it but it was clocked off the Master Rhythm. We went through a few synths; there was the Powertran, we used a Pro-One for a bit and then later got the Moog Source which was the ‘Blue Monday’ bass.

The acquisition of your first digital drum machine in the beloved Oberheim DMX of course gave you ‘Blue Monday’. It must have been like night and day compared with your Boss Dr Rhythm but how was it trying to synch up this state of the art technology with the Polysequencers in those pre-MIDI days.

It was fine, I never had a problem with syncing it up because it was just a clock really. I have honestly come full circle and getting back into it again now. I’m just rediscovering the joys of sending a 1/16th pulse from here, you can’t go wrong with a 1/16th pulse; a nice little square wave… that just drove everything. It’s hard to explain to people but roadies used to get it wrong: “all you’ve got to do is take this lead here, plug it into that hole there and I press this button and it all just works”… never did!

So DMX versus the LinnDrum, why did you go for the DMX?

It was cheaper! LinnDrums were a couple of thousand pounds!

I’ve just been going on about how great old drum machines that don’t sound like drums were, but the thing that sold me on the digital drum machine was a thing on ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’ when it was Stevie Wonder, I can’t remember what he was doing… the double album?

It was him in the studio programming the LinnDrum and it was fantastic, really funky! I thought “bloody hell, I have to get one of those!” There were two; the LinnDrum was more expensive and you couldn’t tune the bass drum on it. Whereas the DMX was less reliable in every respect, but you could tune the bass drum! And that was my justification! It was absolutely a nightmare the first DMX! *laughs*

It got you that stutter on ‘Blue Monday’…

… oh yeah, that was another accident because you’ve just got the 3 levels of velocity and I programmed it. I just hung this riff and programmed it in using the same dynamics as I heard it. In the end, I got so frustrated and put everything in on the loudest one, and they all went “That’s it! That’s it!”… I didn’t think it would turn into a trademark.

You once tried to sell your drum kit during a Radio1 interview in 1983 and declared drums “a bit redundant”. What was your mindset then towards how electronic instrumentation was developing at that time?

I was probably very paranoid, I think I was fearing for my job but I might have been joking as well *laughs*

From what you’ve been telling me about the amount of kit you were getting through, technology was moving at a phenomenal pace. Then early 1985 in ‘Electronics & Music Maker’ magazine, NEW ORDER said they hoped to get either a Fairlight or Synclavier to get round the issues of having to actually connect equipment together for live work?

Yes, that’s right.

Are you glad didn’t get either of those two white elephants? What circumstances allowed you to by-pass the Fairlight / Synclavier thing which your contemporaries were later stuck with?

I think basically they let Bernard and Hooky try it out! *laughs*

There used to be this synthesizer place in London called Syco Systems. I used to go there and ogle at technology. What we used to do was take the Pro-One, because you could get a fantastic bass sound out of it. We’d go to the poor guy with the PPG Wave 2.3 and get him to make it sound like a Pro-One!

I’d go “that sounds nothing like it” and they’d keep putting reverb on it because everything sounds better with reverb… I’d be going “Turn the reverb off! Turn the reverb off!” *laughs*

Why did we never get a Fairlight or Synclavier? They were far too expensive to really justify it plus of course, we had The Hac­ienda! *laughs*

That was the big thing at the end of the day that was one of Martin Hannett’s disagreements. He wanted to buy a Fairlight, everyone else wanted a club so there you go, you can’t have both!

As NEW ORDER became more successful, you and Gillian started getting involved in soundtrack work?

How we got involved was NEW ORDER had agreed to do the music to this programme ‘Making Out’ which was when we were doing ‘Technique’. While we were still doing the album, what would happen was the programme makers would go “we need the music”, so me and Gillian set up in a little room at Real World and started cutting up bits of ‘Technique’, taking bits off the sequencers and locking it up to the pictures and all that. We decided that ‘Vanishing Point’ had to be the theme. We’d never done it before and really enjoyed it.

I did find working with pictures very liberating. It’s fantastic how you can write a piece to music to pictures, and then when you take the pictures away and listen to the music again, it turns into something else. So NEW ORDER were too busy and you just couldn’t do it with four people. When you do music for TV, it’s all tight deadlines which is like, not the way NEW ORDER work! *laughs*

We got into the habit of writing stuff, even though they were just like a load of riffs. You’d spot where you wanted the bits and slot them in, then watch it back, think that its great, record it and add a little production. Eventually it became obvious it wasn’t NEW ORDER doing it and it took a while to persuade people to have our name on it and not NEW ORDER’s… not because we were blowing our own trumpet, but it was Trade Descriptions Act.

And the ‘Reportage’ Theme turned into ‘World In Motion’?

Yes, the opening music for ‘Reportage’ became ‘World In Motion’. I really enjoy doing soundtrack stuff, but now it’s become very overpopulated because everyone realises it’s quite a good thing to do and now, there’s no money in it!

Did it inadvertently make it more difficult to get back together as NEW ORDER after ‘Technique’ for what became ‘Republic’?

There was never any question of the soundtrack work being a reason for us not getting back together, because the number of things I turned down because I had to do NEW ORDER… to the detriment of myself.

The soundtrack stuff mutated into THE OTHER TWO?

Yeah, we’re doing another one now… they’re all got this same gestation process in that they start off as these things for TV, you get really attached to them and you twist one or two of them into being songs. Some of them never turn into songs, but you get persuaded by the record company or someone that you have to get a singer! So we tried to get a singer and then Gillian ended up doing it which is great, she’s really good at it.

THE OTHER TWO’s ‘Tasty Fish’ and ‘Selfish’ are two of the greatest lost pop singles? Discuss…

I think so… the ‘Selfish’ remix on YouTube, I was astounded at the number of hits that got! And I’m thinking “Bloody hell, did we do this?” *laughs*

‘Tasty Fish’… we were terribly sh*t at titles!

I loved the title… it was really funny and I remember seeing the fish ‘n’ chip shop in Stockport that you got it from. I thought it was going to be a hit, but you couldn’t find the CD single in the shops!!

No, you couldn’t! But there you go!

Was it a Factory thing?

Yes, it was a bit. I’m not bitter about Factory at all and I’m not going to moan about it, because it was fantastic. But at that particular time, the money wasn’t going in the right way!

Do you think if you and Gillian had done THE OTHER TWO full time, you could have been as successful as say SAINT ETIENNE or DUBSTAR?

No, we’re completely the wrong kind of people! I’ve tried but it never works! *roars of laughter*

We’ve got a track on THE OTHER TWO’s website called ‘Sawdust’ which is ‘Movin’ On’ remixed by Moby. I was talking to him and I said “imagine if KRAFTWERK had been a country and western band, think about that” and he did this remix of it which was only half finished. I thought it was fantastic and the record company said “it needs a bit more work”, smelling a hit. We went and did a bit more work on it, thinking “fantastic, it could be a hit” and Gillian just said “No way! I’m not going on ‘Top Of The Pops’ with a pig under my arm!” So there you go, we’d never be popstars *laughs*

You know how tapes disintegrate? I thought DATs would last forever, they’re the worst! So I’ve got this on / off project transferring all the old DATs and TV stuff that we did. When you go through it, it has to be from beginning to end. And you have to get the tracking right and hope it stays in… there goes 2 hours of your life! Some of the stuff that never came out, I’m just using it as a vehicle to put on this website and I’ve got to put some more on.

So there’s a new EP from THE OTHER TWO?

Yes, we’re doing the EP at the minute, but there’s three things going. The first, how the hell this has happened I don’t know but it’s a typical cart before the horse thing… we have a sleeve but no record! Peter Saville and his partner Anna did this exhibition in France and wanted some music. He wanted it to sound like a club in the next room! So we did this track and he had a sleeve, but they were only on sale at the exhibition. Now that’s over, I can finish it. When you put it on your record player, you’ll think there’s something really wrong with your stereo! *laughs*

That’s turning into EP No1 and it’s called ‘Swing’. That should be out in the next couple of months. Then there’s THE OTHER TWO album, but I don’t really like saying that I’m doing an album as it takes a year out of your life.

I think artists are put under too much pressure to do albums

Yes, I do… CDs didn’t help because when you did CDs, you had to do like, 15 tracks! And it’s just too much. So this is probably going to be in blocks of 4s or 5s, that’s the plan at the minute.

You played your comeback show at Manchester Apollo in 1998, I made the journey from down south specially and it was all quite emotional…

…you must have been the only person there we didn’t know then!

The return of NEW ORDER saw the band head back into a more guitar dominated rock sound with ‘Get Ready’. What drove that and did you ever miss working with the computers and the synths?

That’s the bloody odd thing, there’s probably more computers on that!

It’s crazy but I’m getting into doing electronic music again, but not on computers. Because nowadays, it’s just chopping up, using the computer to record live drums on and getting them to sound fantastic. They’re a great tool, I’m not knocking computers but there’s not much room for serendipity, for something to happen immediately.

It’s not impossible, it does happen occasionally but you just get locked into that looking at a screen thing and not listening to it. There’s too much information, too many ways of doing stuff. They’re not inspirational although I find Ableton Live software quite inspirational because of the stuff you can do with that. It’s nearly the exception to the rule. Most things are linear and you get into that way of writing with beginning-middle-end and you want it all to look nice and neat. I never used to, but I do get quite obsessive now. It’s not a great way of doing music. But that’s what everyone does.

Were you quite happy with the more guitar driven sound?

It was something different because we’d been away for a bit. It was really working with Steve Osborne, he did a really great job on that because he twisted it so it was more guitary but it wasn’t kind of a rawk thing… he did something really clever with it. It was a bit difficult because it’s like what I was saying about being different… it’s very hard to know.

I honestly think it’s not a good idea to say “Right, I’m going to be different”, but it’s just the NEW ORDER way… “we can’t do that again”!

Are you sad NEW ORDER ended the way it did? Did it finish on a satisfactory note for you?

I never say never really. I personally after ‘Republic’, I thought that was it, I really did. And then something happens and all of a sudden, you’re back doing it again for another 10 years! *laughs*

I had all that in the 90s about when people asked whether NEW ORDER would get back together again. I said “No, that’s it” and you just feel bloody stupid when you do! It’s something I don’t really like in bands, it makes me think they’re terribly indecisive when they can’t decide whether they’re alive or dead. Maybe we should call the next album ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’! *laughs*

I’ve heard that NEW ORDER have got an album’s worth of material in the can, is that true?

Not an album’s worth but we’ve got 7 songs left in various states of assembly. And they’re pretty good. Doing an EP of them will be a great thing to do. It will happen one day, I’m sure it will. It’ll keep the record company going on…

Another boxed set? *laughs*

Yeah, I love boxed sets… I’ve just bought a Robert Wyatt one. It’s a terrible addiction! All my money’s going on boxed sets!

Did you get the KRAFTWERK one?

Yes, that’s over there… I smell it frequently! *chuckles*

NEW ORDER’s back catalogue was reissued as deluxe editions by Warners, but many fans were unhappy about the quality of the remastering, particularly the bonus material. What are your thoughts on that?

Oh Christ! *sighs*

How many cock-ups can a record company make? And you thought Factory were bad? It’s not just the record company, it was a recession led cock-up, the remasters. Originally, the record company wanted to remaster certain recordings, I think they wanted to do 2 or 3 and we said “NO, DO THEM ALL!” but they said no. So we said “DO THE FACTORY ONES!” and they begrudgingly said yes.

Basically, it was just as the recession hit and what happened was the albums got done by John Davies at Alchemy but they folded. All the mastering rooms in London went, I think there’s only Metropolis left. They were halfway through and had done the albums, but not the bonus discs. We were trying to put the bonus discs together and the record company ended up finding any old studio, I think it was somebody’s shed! They did it off really old Sony 1610 digital tapes on badly maintained 1610 players. Unless they are properly maintained, they just kick and add noise etc and that’s what happened.

It was just terrible which is a shame, I wasn’t happy with the whole thing! It was just a f***ing disaster! And we’d been told the tape library was a nightmare and tapes didn’t exist so we went down and had a look. Sure enough, there are all the bloody tapes! “So why didn’t you use the proper analogue tapes?”

Anyway, no use crying over spilt milk. But when we got in, got our hands dirty and started sorting it out, it was perfectly straightforward. It’s the old thing of “if you want something doing, do it yourself”! Somebody else wouldn’t know what the ‘spaghetti western’ version was, because the titles don’t make sense to the untrained observer. So you’ve got to know a bit and be able to decipher the code! *laughs*

But it was a really good experience. We went through loads of tapes, started sorting it out and we kind of fixed all the bonus discs, but then they cocked up sending people the fixed bonus discs, so that was a waste of time! *laughs*

It wasn’t really, because it gave me an idea of what was where, plus what you could do and what you couldn’t do.

Photo by Anton Corbijn

Was your direct involvement in remastering the ‘+-‘ JOY DIVISION box set prompted by this sorry episode?

Yes, I quite enjoyed doing it, but it was more of a nostalgia thing. I’m sure people think it’s us wanting to do these bloody JOY DIVISION boxed sets, because I thought ‘Still’ was enough.

All this “oh, we want to do a JOY DIVISION singles boxed set” and there’s me going “RIGHT! WE’LL DO THIS ONE!”

How do you feel about the music industry in general?

I find it a bit depressing really because of the state that the record companies are in. The internet is great and it’s probably going to be its saving grace, but they’ve just let the boat sail.

I had late night rants with people from Warner Brothers and asked them what they were going to do about the internet and they said “oh, we’ve got the best copy protection money can buy!”… THERE IS NO COPY PROTECTION, what are you on about?

I hated copy protection; it made your CDs jump which cheesed me off!

It was just boll*cks! How do you think copy protection is going to help you? It will hinder you and people will just get round it anyway! You’re thinking about it the wrong way!

You’re part of BAD LIEUTENANT with Bernard Sumner but appear to have a lower profile involvement. Is that a deliberate strategy?

BAD LIEUTENANT? I have a job explaining this to people! At the start, it was Bernard, Jake Evans and Phil Cunningham. They did a bit of writing early on, but I couldn’t do it so they went off and did the record. Then when they came to do some gigs, they asked if I’d do some drumming. So I said I’d do it, I’ve only turned down the odd TV thing. Fortunately, they seem to think because I keep turning up for these things, I’m part of the act now… speak to BAD LIEUTENANT!! *laughs*

What are you up to at the moment?

As well as THE OTHER TWO album, we’re writing the BAD LIEUTENANT album at the same time.

What are your favourite pieces of work from your career?

‘Closer’! On that to be specific, ‘Colony’ and probably ‘Atrocity Exhibition’. Of THE OTHER TWO, ‘Tasty Fish’ because it should have been a hit. And NEW ORDER, I really like the B-side of ‘Temptation’ which was called ‘Hurt’ but because I’ve got all these live videos of us… we used to do it and it went on for ages. After ‘Video 586’, ‘Hurt’ was when we got into the extended electro jam thing and some of the versions of that are fantastic. The single doesn’t really do it justice!

Now, I read this in your interview with GQ… so is it true that Susan Boyle is going to do a JOY DIVISION cover?

That’ll be ‘Atrocity Exhibition’!

IS THAT FOR REAL?!?

IS IT? OF COURSE IT ISN’T TRUE!! IT’S BOLL*CKS! *laughs*

It’s a nice idea, it’s because her album’s called ‘The Gift’ and I thought “bloody hell, Susan Boyle’s done ‘The Gift ‘by THE VELVET UNDERGROUND! That’s pretty wild, I wonder if she’d be interested in doing ‘Atrocity Exhibition’”… obviously it’s not THE VELVET UNDERGROUND’s ‘The Gift’, it’s another one! *laughs*

… although she did ‘Perfect Day’!

Yeah, I’ve not heard that! *laughs*

Are you still collecting tanks?

I would if I had any more room, I’ve got 4, I can’t squeeze anymore in. I’ve got loads of outstanding tank jobs to do and time’s running out!

Is that for those re-enactments?

Oh, those things are wild. Those re-enactment people? Oh no, I’m not one of those… I’ve seen it and observed it from the periphery. Historical re-enactment societies, it’s a bit like The Sealed Knot where you do the English Civil War. It’s great that some people like that; I’m not going to knock it. What’s different makes the world go round but I can’t see it myself. And I just worry about the mindset you’ve got to have to start dressing up as the Waffen SS, it’s not good!

I’ve heard all sorts of stories about things like that. They sent it up on ‘Peep Show’…

… yes, that’s what it’s like!


ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to Stephen Morris

Special thanks to Rebecca Boulton at Prime Management and John Saunders

JOY DIVISION ‘+- : Singles 1976-1980’ is still available as a 10 x 7 inch boxed set or as a download album

Kevin Cummins’ photobooks ‘Joy Division’ and ‘New Order’ are available through a variety of retail outlets

http://www.neworder.com/

http://theothertwo.co.uk

https://twitter.com/stephenpdmorris

https://soundcloud.com/the-other-two

http://www.neworderonline.com/

http://www.worldinmotion.net

http://www.kevincummins.co.uk/


Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
15th March 2011

Newer posts »