Good morning,
How was your weekend?
We’ve got the perfect tonic for those Monday morning blues: a nice long chin-wag with Stephen Morris, New Order’s drummer, one half of The Other Two and an all round good egg. He’s got some great stories about New Order back in the 80s and even spills the beans about a possible new album.
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Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… New Order’s Stephen Morris
While New Order’s 1981 debut Movement found them, in frontman Bernard Sumner’s words, “stumbling around in the dark”, by 1983’s Power, Corruption & Lies, they had stepped out of the long shadow of Joy Division and made their first bona fide classic. 1985’s third album, Low-Life, saw them further crystallising their sound and cementing their reputation as one of the greatest bands of the ‘80s. On Friday, the band released a deluxe, ‘Definitive Edition’ of the album, featuring a raft of bonus material, live concerts, demos, unreleased material and an extra set of 12-inch singles. A couple of weeks ago, drummer Stephen Morris called up Chris to talk about it and share some top-drawer New Order anecdotes…
Hello?
Hello, is that Chris?
Hi Stephen, how are you?
How did you know it was me?
Because I was expecting your call. I’ve been looking forward to it.
Oh right. I’ll try not to disappoint then!
Are you back home at the moment?
Yeah, and I’m bloody freezing. We’ve just been messing around with things and rehearsing since Christmas.
You were in America on a co-headlining tour with the Pet Shop Boys before Christmas. How did that work out?
Everyone ended up wanting to go on first after a bit. Originally it was very democratic. It would be us and then Pet Shop Boys, Pet Shops Boys then us, us then Pet Shop Boys… which worked out nicely. But then because of printing the tickets, it went for the headliners: us, us, us, us, Pet Shop Boys, Pet Shop Boys, Pet Shop Boys, us, us, us… so we started to be like, ‘Can’t we go on first?’ We all wanted to go to bed early for some Sanatogen and Horlicks, all us ageing pop stars. It was good though.
How would you have reacted if that idea has been floated back in 1985?
We’d probably be furious.
The new ‘definitive’ version of New Order’s third album Low-Life is being reissued. If this is definitive, will it make all past and future reissues…
Will it render them obsolete? I was having a look at it this morning. Is it definitive? You can argue about that – and people will. I like box sets as a music fan, but as a purveyor of box sets, for a while I couldn’t see why anybody would want to listen to stuff that we discarded back in the ‘80s. But then I put my other head on and thought, ‘Well, if I actually liked New Order - which seems a strange thing to say - but you know, if I was a fan of New Order, what would I like?’ And I came to the conclusion that a lot of the stuff we discarded would probably be OK to put in a box.
To be fair to you guys, you left so much great stuff off your albums in the first place – singles, 12-inches, remixes – that it’s not like you’re scraping the barrel.
No, that’s true. We did discard some stuff. For example, there was another version of Elegia but it was kind of like, ‘Well, I can’t really inflict this on anybody else, because I can barely tell the difference and I’m on it.’ How many more versions of it do you actually need? Stuff like that rule themselves out. One of the video things that isn’t on there is the infamous [80s music show] Rock Around The Clock thing we did for the BBC. That ruled itself out because the BBC got rid of the tapes, so the only copy we could find was copied off a VHS so it would looked a bit shit.
Tell us the story behind that…
Oh yeah, that was a fantastic idea. What could possibly go wrong? All you had to do was turn up at the BBC and play two songs live. How hard could it be? It was the August Bank Holiday and on the Friday we’d done a gig at St Austell Coliseum so we were out Cornwall way. Bernard came up with a brilliant idea that we should perform a medley of Blue Monday and The Perfect Kiss which seemed reasonable, but we didn’t actually have that particular version [programmed] at the time. On the Saturday, Hooky and everybody else wisely decided to go on a jolly in London and left us in a seaside hotel with a synthesizer, a drum machine and a sequencer to accomplish this feat of programming. I mean, how hard could it be to join two songs together in the tearoom of a seaside hotel while parents and kids watched on and Rob [Gretton, New Order’s legendary manager] drank Stella Artois?
It took a lot longer than we imagined, but by teatime everything was done. Great, we’re going to blow their socks off with this one. On the day, we forgot it was a Bank Holiday so on the drive up to London we got stuck behind loads of caravans so it took us a considerable amount of time to get up there. Hooky was already there with most of the gear, so we weren’t too worried. All we had to do was bung this little cassette into the sequencer. We got there with 15 minutes to spare, popped this little data cassette into the sequencer, pressed load and this thing just went: ERROR. Don’t worry, we’ve got a backup, we’ll stick that in… ERROR. ‘Fucking hell, what are we going to do?!?’ Having spent all day working on this thing, Bernard was very displeased, so the entire performance became enthused with this angst, which I think is great. Bernard is absolutely furious and it's all live on television. They nearly pulled the plug on us because he kept swearing and it was live on TV. “IF HE SWEARS ONE MORE TIME WE’RE GONNA PULL THE PLUG!” It was, as Tony Wilson described it, ‘great television, darling, great television.’ At the time I didn’t think it was great. I was disappointed to find that the BBC hadn’t cherished it in the way that I’d hoped and it had been chucked out along with a load of old Doctor Whos [NB: as well as collecting old tanks, Stephen is also a massive Doctor Who fan]
Given you were using cutting-edge technology at the time, that must have happened a lot. It’s not like you could just program it all on a fancy modern-day synthesiser.
If we’d known a bit more about music and the technology, we would have been more successful probably. We were using stuff that wasn’t meant to even be moved and shoving it in the back of a truck. Within a couple of months of Low-Life coming out this thing called MIDI came out, so we had hyper-reliable gear from then on. So any breakdowns were 100% the fault of the band members, we couldn’t really blame the floppy disc. The Emulator was always breaking and we had this big sampling keyboard that was notorious for going wrong, but we found the way to fix it was to hit the heatsink button on the back with a piece of scaffolding. We used to get phone calls from other bands on the road: ‘How do you fix this?’ ‘You see the serial number, just above that, really fucking whack it…’ If that didn’t work, you just picked it up and dropped it and that seemed to do the trick.
What do you think about Low-Life listening back to it now?
I think it’s pretty good. Someone described it as our first proper album, which it really is in a number of respects. It’s got the single on it [The Perfect Kiss] which we begrudgingly said yes to. The edited version of it, but there you go, it’s the single. It’s what you’ve always wanted…
Did you take some persuading to do that?
I think there was money involved. It was something that we said we’d never do, and we hadn’t done it before. It was a quite contrary thing to actually do. The encouragement to do it came largely from the other side of the Atlantic, because this was our first album that was going to be released on an American label and they were quite keen on you doing things like that, like putting your face on the cover. Which ended up being my face.
Low-Life is the only New Order album to feature the band on the sleeve. How did you end up being the one on the front?
[Factory’s in-house designer] Peter Saville’s concept was to demystify the band. It hadn’t struck me that we needed any demystifying. He knew that it would be impossible to get a picture of us together, we’d just take the piss out of each other mercilessly, so we had individual appointments to turn up and do it as this sort of black and white polaroid then piss off. How mine ended up on the front I don’t know. When we went to Japan it was on all the posters and everyone thought I was the singer. Everyone’s picture was inside so the idea was that once you bought it you could change it. I remember going into HMV in the 90s when they reissued it on CD and being horrified that you could buy ones with the others on the front. I opened them up and changed them back.
Was there a big push from Factory to break you in America at this point? Low-Life came out on Quincy Jones’ label.
Oh yeah. Tony discovered LA. He used to say, “in a few years’ time you guys are going to be sat by the swimming pool sipping cocktails in LA.” Really? I don’t want to do that. But Tony thought it was great hanging out with all these Hollywood execs. He was very impressed by these moguls, he considered himself one, so Tony got seduced by it. We had a big listening party and had to talk to all these people, it was a bit Spinal Tap. They’d say things like: ‘You guys didn’t do an encore last night and there was a riot.’ And we’d be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, we do that a lot!’ and they’d say, ‘Well, don’t do it again!’’
What was Quincy Jones like?
He was lovely. Absolutely fantastic. He’s made so many great records and he was such a nice guy. We went round his house and I ended up fixing his stereo for him. He asked if we could do some recording together, but I was scared to death. If he saw us in the studio he’d realise we didn’t know what we were doing. He ended up doing a remix of Blue Monday for us so that was a consolation.
The writing session for The Perfect Kiss is included in the new boxset. Can you recall what the song’s ‘working title’ was?
Oh, everybody knows that story. It was a spur of the moment thing. The first time we played it, I think it was for a miners’ benefit, and Rob said, ‘Play that new one you’re working on, it’s fucking great.’ So we went on and did ‘the new one’ as it was probably called and Bernard announced it as: ‘This one’s called I’ve Got A Cock As Long As The M1…’ The American record company probably wouldn’t have gone with that one. It probably wouldn’t have been the single with that particular title. But you know, that’s the sort of thing we did, making up songs on stage and Bernard would make up random words and we’d listen to cassettes back and try and use snippets if anything didn’t contain too much blasphemy.
It’s been nearly eight years since the last New Order album, Music Complete, came out. Might we get another one soon?
We never make plans. We never really have made plans. I mean, when we did Low-Life we weren’t planning, ‘Oh, this is gonna be the next album...’ We were just doing a lot. Nowadays, we’re a bit more professional about it. So the ideas need to have reached a certain standard before it’s deemed worthy of pushing it on an audience. But yeah, we’re thinking about it.
Music Complete was your tenth album and it’s probably one of my favourite New Order records.
Yeah, that’s another thing that makes it difficult. Music Complete was actually quite easy to do and it was really good. So it’s kind of like, Now we’re gonna have to really try... We set the bar a bit too high with that one!
So, should we say: you’d like to and you’re thinking about it, but we shouldn’t expect anything any time soon?
I mean, it would be good. We need to get the ball rolling on music and just do a couple of songs as downloads and maybe do that. I think that’s the way to go forward. Just get something good enough to put out in that moment.
Thanks so much for talking to us, Stephen.
No, thank you. Take care, bye.
Low-Life, The Definitive Edition, is out now.
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