This is the rough translation of the interview to New Order appeared on the April 2003 issue of Italian music magazine RockSound. NEW ORDER
Our first twenty years
The band from Manchester, without any doubts, was the first and the most believing to bring the punk and new wave audience to the world of dance music, influencing irrevocably the last twenty years of pop culture.
Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Steve Morris (the fourth member, Gillian Gilbert, is temporarily out of the band because of family matters) have just released a luxury 4 CD set box, Retro, and a compilation, International, marking another arriving point.
"The fans were asking us from many years to release a box set, something that could summarize, at least in part, our career. Anyway we weren't interested in the traditional concept of "greatest hits", so we involved other people in the process to choose the tracks. Two journalist friends, Miranda Sawyer and John McCready, have compiled the first two CDs, with stuff from our records, Mike Pickering, the historic DJ at the Hacienda, chose our best remixes, and finally Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream did the live selection. We usually prefer to deal with the new songs, to work on future albums and it did seem interesting to leave this project in external hands.
We were sometimes amazed from the choices too, we rediscovered some tracks we didn't even remember, like the reggae remix of Regret by Sabres Of Paradise. There are also many pictures in the booklet with Retro, which is unusual for us, we used to never use them on our records. Some are truly embarrassing...
The genesis of International, on the opposite, is very easy: it's a compilation especially for our younger audience, which maybe knows us only for our last two or three records. A sort of general introduction to New Order, then."
The most interesting choice is about Bobby Gillespie doing a work of "archeology", researching in twenty years of live recordings to extract only one CD.
"He dealt with this task as a true fan, preferring passion to digital quality, and from a certain point of view I understand him. When you're passionate about a band, yuo buy anything, even badly recorded bootlegs, just to have unreleased tracks. Let's say that between the four of them, it was the most difficult CD to make, because it made emerge again weird sensations we thought we had forgotten."
As we were saying early, New Order have been essential in the passage from the new wave to the indie scene, and the following dance explosion. The track identifying best this fact is, no doubt, the epoch making Blue Monday, of 1983.
"At the time we made a sequencer with a do it yourself kit, and we were starting to experiment with the first drum machines. Blue Monday was useful as a mean of experimentation, it was rather a casual try. The rhythm was made pressing the wrong key, but we immediately liked it. At the time we had friends in Berlin who were sending us boxes with German and Italian dance records, and that was a huge inspiration. The bass line of the track was inspired from Sylvester, the one of You Make Me Feel, while the instrumentation from Dirty Talk by Klein And The MBO, an Italian disco band. We assembled everything like the DJs do today, and we recorded it in a studio where Pink Floyd had worked as well. It had giant speakers and when we heard the track for the first time we went crazy: it was really like being in a club, it was perfect to dance. "
Between 1983 and 1989 New Order had their maximum frenzy period, with a dozen of singles and four albums.
"In that period there wasn't anything else in our lives other than music: we were vampirized by that. We couldn't go on like that, it didn't make sense, we would have stayed one dimensional men, with no alternatives. They were crazy years, and we passed them with a full immersion in the club culture, with all its excesses. We played, we took small amounts of acid, we stayed awake all night to dance in the club: we stopped before it was too late."
For almost their entire career, New Order refused external collaborations. In the recent years things did change. Why?
"Actually it's strange. Only recently we started to deal with external musicians like Bobby Gillespie or Billy Corgan. I think part of that past attitude came from Rob Gretton, our manager, who wanted to protect us from the outside. We are self learning musicians and the easiest way to learn for us is to deal with other people; for this reason, when we start to work on a new album, before playing the instruments, we prefer to listen to all the new music around, and make us indirectly influenced by that. It doesn't always work, though. At the time of Republic, in 1993, our idea was to listen to the Top 10 of Dance music to find some possible source of inspiration. It wasn't possible, they were all just shitty records. "
Interview by Stefano Gilardino
