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Bernard Sumner
[interview, April 1994]
Bernard onstage
Bernard Albrecht Sumner
I first met Ian at a gig at the Electric Circus. It might have been the
Anarchy tour, it might have been The Clash, or one of them punk groups. Ian
was with another lad called Ian, and they both had donkey jackets, and Ian
had “HATE” written on the back of his donkey jacket. I remember liking him
. He seemed pretty nice, but we didn’t talk to him that much. I just
remembered him. Later on, about a month later when we decided to try and
find a singer, cos me and Hooky had formed a group, and we put an
advertisement in Virgin Records in Manchester, which was the way that all
groups formed during the punk era.
In Market Street?
It was just off Piccadilly, actually. Mark Reader used to work there before
he went to Berlin. Anyway, we put an advertisement in there, and I got loads
of head cases ringing me up. Complete maniacs. The Ian rang up, and I said,
weren’t you the one I met at that gig, that Clash gig? With the other Ian?
That’s me, he said. So I said, right, okay, you can be the singer then. We
didn’t even audition him, we asked what sort of music he liked, and it was
the same kind of music as us, so we gave him the job over the phone.
Was he at the Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall?
I don’t know. I didn’t know him at that point, this gig where we met him
was after that one. I was at the first one.
Did you like it?
Malcolm McLaren was on the ticket office at that one… Yeah, I recorded that
gig, but it turned out so distorted that it was unlistenable. I did like it
, yeah. I didn’t think they were good, I thought they were bad, but that’s
why I liked it. I thought they destroyed the myth of being a pop star, or
of a musician being some kind of god that you had to worship. In fact a
friend who was with me said, Jesus, you could play guitar as good as that.
Who did you go with?
I went with Hooky and Terry, our roadie. Looks like George Formby on an E.
Terry is a bit of an odd-looking chap, as you can agree from the photograph,
he’s into all these oddball groups like. He’d read somewhere about the
Sex Pistols having a fight onstage and he dragged us down to see them.
I was born and raised in Lower Broughton in Salford, which is very near to
the centre of Manchester, I could walk there. The Earwell valley, the river,
was about 100 yards away from where I lived, and it stank. When I got a bit
older we moved to a tower block on the other side of the river. I was
brought up with my grandparents and my mother, and my mother eventually
married, and my stepfather moved over the river with us when I was about
eleven. At the time I thought it was fantastic, it felt like I was moving to
New York. I loved the tower blocks, I loved the way Manchester was being
remodelled, to me they were changing it into New York, and that equalled
excitement, and The Future. Now of course I realise that it was an absolute
disaster.
That was when, the early sixties?
Mid sixties. In fact it was 1967.
Where did you go to school?
St. Clement’s in Lower Broughton, which is now a joinery work placement
thing. The whole place where I grew up has been totally decimated. At the
end of our street was a huge chemical factory, which I also drove past today
, and where I used to live is just oil drums and oil drums filled with
chemicals. I guess what happened in the sixties was the chemical factory and
my street and my area, where I used to live, someone at the council decided
that it wasn’t very healthy, and something had to go, and unfortunately it
was my neighbourhood that went.
Must be weird.
It left a really strong impression on me… it’s funny to touch on this,
because everyone says Joy Division’s music was gloomy and I guess it was,
and for people who were like twenty three, twenty four, it was incredibly
heavy music, and I often get asked by journalists why this was so. The only
answer I can give is my answer, why it was heavy for me. I can guess at why
it was heavy for Ian, but for me, was because the whole neighbourhood that
had grown up had been completely decimated in 1967, whenever it was.
What happened was, me and my parents moved out, so that was the first break.
About two years later my grandfather died, and that was the second break.
About a year after that, they moved my grandmother out to a different part
of Manchester called Swinton, and there was no sense of community there.
There was a huge sense of community where we’d lived. I remember playing
out in the summer holidays as kid, when we could stay up late, and we used
to play out in the street, and eleven twelve o’clock at night there would
be old ladies outside the house, talking to each other. All the kids would
stay out. When it was a nice hot summer’s night, everyone used to stay out.
Like the West Indians do now, basically?
Yeah. Now Swinton, where they moved her to, you’re not even safe sat in the
house, never mind sat outside, so they moved her to a real soulless
community in this place. I didn’t know at the time but I also had been
moved to a place that had no sense of community, simply because it was a
tower block.
So there was a number of breaks in life there, and after that my stepfather
died of cancer, and that was another break. So when people say about the
death in Joy Division’s music, or about darkness, by the age of twenty two,
I’d had quite a lot of loss in my life. The place where I used to live,
and where I had my happiest memories - and let’s face it, everybody’s
happiest memories, I think, are from when you’re a kid, and every day was
sunny, there’s no inhibitions and no hang-ups - well, all that had gone.
All that was left was a chemical factory. It’s all gone, the houses, the
people. So there’s this void that you can never, ever go back to. When I
was twenty two I realised that I could never go back to that happiness. So
for me, Joy Division was about the death of my community, and my childhood.
It was absolutely irretrievably.
Most people don’t go through something like that until they’re in their
forties, with the death of parents. That’s really serious.
I was sixteen when it started, when my grandfather died.
And being an only child makes it worse.
It does, because I had to be the adult of the family. I was the only boy,
the only child. I had to sit in the funeral car with my grandmother. Just my
grandmother. It was a really heavy time when I was too young to have to go
through it. I’m not going to tell you the next bit, which was heavier than
that. But basically the result was that I was quite… less personal and more
looking at the outside world, at the effect that… I had a pretty wild time
at school, I felt that being young was a time to enjoy myself, so I didn’t
knuckle down at my studies. What I wanted to do was go out chasing after
girls, go shoplifting in Manchester, and do incredibly stupid things that
schoolboys do.
But when I left school at sixteen and got a job, I realised rather quickly
that life in a working environment was… my first job was at Salford Town
hall sticking down envelopes, sending rates bills out. Real life came to be
as a horrible shock. I was chained in this horrible office every day, every
week, every year, with maybe three weeks holiday a year. This horror
enveloped me, you know. Jesus, wake up, this is what real life is. So also
the music of Joy Division was about the death of optimism, of youth.
Speaking outside of my personal life, in the world, there was a death there
as well. Which was, unless you wriggle out of this, like a snake, life is
gonna be dismal.
Just before Joy Division was a time of total upheaval. When I think, it was
more upheaval than most people would have by the age I am now. It came very
early. That’s what Joy Division was for me, and what I was expressing, I
suppose, in my contribution to Joy Division.
How long did it take to get together? You had that period when you were
doing thrash numbers, and you had all those different drummers… what was
going on then?
What was going on then was, I guess it was like when you first have sex, if
you’re a complete virgin, and the first time you do it, you’re completely
hopeless at it, you get it all wrong. That’s what happened then, in that
period. Can I just add here that we were never called Warsaw, and we were
never called the Stiff Kittens, we were called Joy Division straight away.
They were just names that were thrown around. The first songs that we
started playing, maybe you’ve heard some stuff, but there was a previous
set of songs before that, that were absolutely bloody awful.
Guts?
Guts, yeah, we knew it was an awful title, but that’s why we used it. We
even did a piss-take of a punk song, that turned up somewhere a couple of
years ago. I thought, Jesus, were we that bad? But it was a piss-take.
Obviously, from my viewpoint now, music’s like anything else, you have to
educate yourself, or be educated by it, until you’re good at it. Those were
the days of our education.
Who thought of the name?
I was reading a book, House of Dolls, and I showed it to Ian, and I honestly
don’t know who came up with it, but we just thought it was a great pair of
words, really. Regardless of the content. You do know of course that we are
not Nazis??? Of course we’re not, and we never were.
How about the first sleeves, did you just like the graphics of it?
The first sleeve, no, the war. World War Two, because I lived with my
grandparents, you’re told stories about your parents, and your parents are
role models, and they tell you about the world. My grandparents used to tell
me about the war. My aunt (?) was buried under a bomb site, and we had a
room upstairs with gas masks and sand bags and English flags, tin helmets.
My grandmother used to tell me about the sacrifices that all these people
had made, so that we could be free. And I loved my grandfather, so I just
though, I’ll never forget. I know it’s incredibly unfashionable, but I’ll
never forget what all these old guys did for us in the Second World War. It
can never be underestimated or undermined. It wasn’t a very fashionable
thing in the sixties to look at the past. What I’m trying to say is that
the Second World War left a big impression on me, via my grandparents. So
the sleeve was that impression. It wasn’t pro-Nazi, quite the contrary. I
just thought that people shouldn’t forget. As I was growing up, I felt that
I was being taught by other people, how to act, my teachers, how to act and
how to relate to the world. The generation before had gone through a period
when the whole civilised western world had gone through a world war. People
had behaved in a completely insane way, killing each other.
At that time, ‘76, ‘77, a lot of weirder stuff started coming out, about
the war. So you got a different view of the war coming out then.
Have you read Dave Rimmer’s book? He goes on about that, the essence of
what he says is… some people have a sexual fetish for gas masks, because of
an influence from the war. In America it doesn’t exist, they didn’t have
the same apparatus. What I’m saying is there was a kind of echo through
time from my grandparents. I just felt that the whole world had gone fucking
mad. as a kid. I just thought, fashionable or unfashionable, it shouldn’t
be forgotten, so that it doesn’t happen again.
How did it work, when you started to work together? You’d found Steven by
the time of the first record…
When we first started it was me and Hooky in my grandmother’s parlour,
front room, and she had a gramophone that played 78 records, I took the
needle out, and wired to jack sockets to the gramophone, and I plugged my
guitar into one, and Hooky plugged his bass into the other, and we bought a
book to learn how to play, and we played through this little gramophone. We
wrote these appalling songs based on the book, cos the whole technique of
the book was in the songs. We decided that we couldn’t go any further
without a singer and drummer, so…
What did Ian bring to it?
He brought a direction. Ian was into extremities of life. He wanted to make
extreme music, and he wanted to be totally extreme onstage, no half measures
. I’ve told you about my influence from my grandparents from the war. Ian’
s influence seemed to be madness and insanity. He said that his sister, or
his aunt or somebody, had worked in a mental home, and she used to tell him
things about the people in the mental home: people with twenty nipples or
two heads, and that left a big impression on him. Part of the time when Joy
Division was forming, he worked in a rehabilitation centre for people with
physical and mental disabilities, trying to find work again. He was very
much affected by those people… She’s Lost Control was about a girl who
used to come in to the centre and try to find work. She had epilepsy and
lost more and more time through it, and then one day she just didn’t come
in anymore. He assumed that she’d found a job, but found out later that she
’d had a fit and died. He lived in Macclesfield when he was a kid, and I
think he lived it Stretford for a while, near Moss Side. In Macclesfield
there was a little Mongol kid that lived in a house with a garden, and he
grew up round there, and the kid would never be able to come out of the
house, and the kid’s whole universe was the house to the garden wall. He
said many years later that he moved back to Macclesfield and walked past the
house, and by chance he saw the kid. Ian had grown up from being five to
twenty, twenty two years old, the kid still looked exactly the same, and his
universe was still the house and the garden, and that’s what The Eternal
was about…
Is Macclesfield an odd place?
To me it is. I come from Salford, west of Manchester, and Macclesfield is
south of Manchester. I come from… well, I was a skinhead - but not a
horrible fascist arsehole skinhead - the kind that was into Motown and that
sort of era. Just after the mods. I was a scooter boy. We were always told
never to go to Macclesfield because it was full of greasers and Hell’s
Angels, and if you were a skinhead or a scooter boy, you’d get beaten up.
There were loads of people who smoked marijuana and took smack. There were
no drugs around when I was a skinhead. Maybe some mandrax and some kind of
uppers, but no draw; that was for hippies and Hell’s Angels, and they lived
in Macclesfield. We always considered Macclesfield to be a bit hicky, still
do actually. Fashion-wise, they always seem to be about three years behind
the rest of Manchester. It is actually quite nice, the hills around, but if
you drive round there on a winter night, and I’ve done it, you won’t see a
soul on the street.
Are those hills kind of sinister as well as being beautiful?
No, not to me. The hills are the escape from it. From the horrible,
industrial dead landscape of Salford and most of Manchester. If you went on
the top deck of the bus, you could always see the hills in the distance. It
was a place to escape to. I read your article, the bit about the Moors
Murderers, and it was interesting. It did have an effect on everyone. The
effect on me was that my mother was completely paranoid about letting me out
of her sight. I was chained to the fucking street. I was a very lonely
child because I was chained to that street, my mother wouldn’t let me out
of her sight, and she would never explain why. If my mates went out to the
cinema, I could never go, I had to stay in the street. I thought she was
really strict, but I kind of realise why it was, now, because of the Moors
Murderers.
The hills are quite beautiful, the sheer contrast alone between the moors
and the industrial filth that surrounded us, in the sixties. In the sixties
… I remember someone telling me on the way home from school that Salford
was considered the biggest slum in Europe, and I couldn’t believe it,
because it was where I lived. I read that living in Salford was the
equivalent of smoking seventy cigarettes a day, and I couldn’t believe it;
it was where I lived.
So I found out about the beauty of the hills, and the contrast, before I
found out about the Moors Murderers, so I had a nice picture of the moors
before I had the horror picture.
And did that horror picture come?
It came, yeah. I remember being in Heaton Park with my cousins, and we were
playing on the swing and in the woods, and one of my cousins disappeared, we
couldn’t find him. I remember travelling home on the bus, preparing to
tell his mother that the Moors Murderers had got him. We just assumed that
he wouldn’t be there when we got back, because they’d got him. It did have
an effect, but like any other hardship in life, you rise to the occasion,
and you learn to deal with it, you’ve got to. It’s happened, where you
lived, and you had to deal with it.
To go back to House of Dolls; when you bought it, were there a lot of second
-hand shops selling weird stuff?
No, some bloke where I worked at the time gave me five books and that was
one of them. One of the others was called Knights of the Bushido, which was
Japanese atrocities. Another was Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong. I can’t
remember the other two.
Let me go back to the name. The name, regardless of the content, we just
thought it was a very strong name, but we also thought: we’re punks. We’re
anarchists. We can do whatever we want. We’ll use this name and see if
people really do accept… anarchism.
To contradict what I’ve just said, we were only answerable to ourselves,
that was our… modus operandi. So we knew that we weren’t Nazis, and that
was good enough for us. At the same time, I don’t really want to use this,
but we were doing gigs for Rock Against Racism. We didn’t feel we should
defend ourselves, because we knew we weren’t Nazis, quite the opposite. We
didn’t feel that we had to go out to the press, saying wait a minute, that
first sleeve is actually anti-Nazi. Wait a minute, we just happen to be
doing gigs for Rock Against Racism at the moment. We didn’t feel we had to
do that, because we thought it was a bit crass. Our attitude was, if anyone
wants to know if we’re Nazis, ask us, and we’ll tell you the truth. But
nobody asked us. We were also being naive, to be fair.
What was Ian like then?
He had moments of intensity, but he was fun. Primarily he was a fun guy, a
good laugh. I a weird way. He wasn’t a straight person. Let me start with
his moments of intensity, which was when he got frustrated. He used to get
incredibly frustrated with Rob, which later on so did I funnily enough. I
remember him having an argument with Rob about a phone bill at a hotel. He
wanted to phone his wife, and the bill came to five quid, and Ian only had
four quid, or three or something, and he wanted the band to make up the rest
of the money, and Rob was saying no. He went fucking bananas, completely
crazy. He went from being this nice, polite, pleasant, funny person to being
completely insane. I remember having an argument with Rob at the rehearsal
room, where a lot of those photographs come from, which is TDA Davidson’s.
He got so frustrated he picked up the garbage bucket, stuck it over his head
and starting running up and down the rehearsal room, screaming at Rob, and
he was just completely mad. So frustrated that Rob couldn’t see his point
of view. Rob’s pretty strong-willed, and I’m pretty strong-willed, and Ian
was strong-willed when he was riled, and so in two words, he had an
explosive personality. But most of the time, he was cool. He really was. He
deserves a lot of the attention that he’s got. He does.
It’s hard to say, if he hadn’t of committed suicide, and I’m jumping
ahead a bit, he would probably have written a really good book. He was a
real writer which is probably why you fucking wanky journalists really like
him. It’s your medium.
Actually it was the music and the performance - which was amazing - that
drew me in.
His performance, I guess, was a manifestation of this kind of frenzy that he
went into. He was Ian, and then suddenly [snaps fingers] he’d hit this
threshold and become this manic person whose head was in another world. Like
I say, he was like that onstage, but he was like that if you had an
argument with him as well.
When did he really start hitting his stride?
With the material for Unknown Pleasures, really. That was about Mk III.
Unknown Pleasures took about six months to write, and was the second or
third set of material that we’d got. The first set we were just having fun
really, learning where to put your fingers on the guitar, and what sort of
guitar picks and amplifiers to use. Unknown Pleasures was our first outing
into the real world. It was our first effort, really, the rest of it was
just practise.
…Martin?
Martin Hannett? Martin was… I can describe his effect on our music. Only in
the studio, not writing. These days, we write our stuff in the studio. I
those days, the song would be 95% finished and Martin would add his touches.
Maybe five percent more, keyboard parts or overdubs. Martin was a catalyst.
He was one of those people who just being around you would make you write a
great keyboard or guitar or bass part. Although like I say, most of the
things we did when he was there was overdubs. Talking about Unknown
Pleasures. I felt that most of Martin’s best work was done when he did it
quickly. I feel the best track he ever mixed was Atmosphere. We started
playing that song about the time of the Yorkshire Ripper, and we played it a
couple of dodgy places out in Yorkshire. Steve and Hooky got arrested when
we came back, cos we’d been playing in the red light districts, and they
were suspected of being the Yorkshire Ripper. So they got carted off, and
this was right at the time we were playing Atmosphere.
I remember that track with the lift…
Me and Hooky hated all that, to be honest. Unknown Pleasures was our first
outing, and we’d played it live a few times, and it was a powerful, almost
heavy metal kind of stuff, to us. Two things Ian said. One, he never wanted
to get any bigger than the Kinks ever got. What he wanted to do was get onto
the heavy metal circuit in America, which was really weird. He really loved
the Stooges, and he wanted to get into what the Stooges were into. But I
suppose everyone liked the Stooges.
So the music, we felt, was quite loud and heavy, and we felt that Martin had
toned it down, especially with the guitars, taken out the more raucous
elements of it, and made it into a tamer version than what me and Hooky saw.
So we didn’t actually like Unknown Pleasures.
In retrospect, it worked as a mood.
It did, yeah, but it inflicted this dark, doomy mood over the album, which
we’d… drawn a picture in black and white, and he’d coloured it in for us.
We kind of resented that, but I must admit…
Seeing you live at that point, something like She’s Lost Control was really
raucous…
Yeah, really raucous and hard. In your face, and all that had been taken out
, but Rob loved it, and Wilson loved it, and the press loved it, and the
public loved it, so, we were just the poor stupid musicians who wrote it! We
swallowed our pride and went with it. Stuff that he did, like Atmosphere, I
thought was beautiful. Atmosphere was on a 16-track, and it was the first
polyphonic synthesiser that I got, which was a Cellini (?) string synth, and
a Bontempi organ from Woolworths, and I used to play both of them together,
and I couldn’t believe you could get a synthesiser that could play more
then one note. That was a real turn on for me. We had a limited period of
time to do it in, and me and Hooky always felt that Martin did his best
stuff when he did it quick, and didn’t have too much time to think about it
. We liked Closer. We really liked that.
It’s starker, it doesn’t have so much ambient stuff. There’s one where
you can hear munching crisps, echoing away.
About Closer. We stayed at a flat in Baker Street, two adjoining flats, half
the band stayed in one, the other half in the other. What we used to do at
night, because Martin was trying desperately to get us into taking drugs. He
loved staying up, and I had some sleepers and used to take them during the
day, and Martin was trying to get us to take drugs at night, but I was into
… I suppose you’d call it slacking, these days. In those days I used to
call it being a lazy twat. I couldn’t believe that I was now a professional
musician, so my whole ambition was to do something that I enjoyed, but not
actually work hard at it. Just let the ether flow through me, and I’d be
this medium for this music from the spirits that came through me. Not from
the spirits, but from heaven. I’d just lie there and the music would come
through my fingers, because I was imagining that was what art was.
Did that ever happen?
Yeah, I think it did. Apart from the higher aspect of that, it also appealed
to me, being extremely lazy. So to the sessions for Closer, in another
interview of yours that I read, Martin mentioned me bringing my sleeping bag
into the studio, and I’d just lay there all night. In fact I did a lot of
the keyboards for Closer while I was laid down, with this ARP Omni
synthesiser. I was so relaxed, I was getting into sleepers and it’s there
in the blood. Even though we got up about four o’clock in the afternoon,
all evening we’d be super-relaxed, and I enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly
. Laid down on this couch at the back end of Britannia Row.
A weird thing happened one night. We were doing Decades, and… we used to
record it by direct injection, where you put the synth straight into the
board, but we wanted some real life ambience on it, so Britannia Row had a
huge games room, so Martin put some big speakers up in there. On Unknown
Pleasures I may have put his work down, but it could be so exciting, the
studio was like a new world to us.
Didn’t he mike the whole studio, play games with the studio…?
Yeah, he did. Mostly at Strawberry, but Britannia Row was a much better
sound. Strawberry was a seventies kind of design studio, where they deaden
everything down, take the room out of everything, which scientifically is
very sound, but it never worked out, because the machines weren’t good
enough to reproduce the room sounds. The idea with seventies sound was the
whole studio would be completely dead and muffled, and you’d add the echo
and reverb by machines, but the technology wasn’t up to it and that idea
has been ditched. People now build ambient studios, which is wrong. Now that
we’ve got the machines to reproduce it, the studios also reproduce it… I
’m getting a bit long-winded… most of Closer we’d pumped out through some
big speakers, and recorded the speakers, to make it sound live. On Decades,
the track finished - this might still be there on the track - and we were
just winding on to finish the tape, and there was an eerie, ghostly
whistling of one of the tunes out of Decades, and there was no-one in the
room. If you go to those master tapes now it might still be there. It really
freaked us all out.
Were you sometimes doing things with the music, that pulled you together
when you played live, or in the studio, that you didn’t quite understand?
We were aware… it’s difficult to speak for everyone but one of the funny
things is we never really talked about the music, we had an understanding
about the music. We never felt the need to vocalise. One thing I felt was
that there was an other-worldliness to the music, that we were plucking out
of the air. When we were all turned on by a track, it seemed to come out of
thin air, not from us four musicians. I’m sure it was the same for everyone
, but we never talked about it. Again, we felt that talking about the music,
or about the inspiration for the music, would stop that inspiration. As a
writer, you might write something, and then look at it after and then
analyse it afterwards. But if you analyse that sentence, then the next one
is very difficult to write. As I’ve grown older as a musician, it first
occurred to me when we were working with Arthur Baker, that this became a
frustration, that we couldn’t sit down one evening and say, let’s stay up
all night and write a great song. What we had to do was wait to be handed
this note, and it could take three weeks, a month. You could be jamming
endless shit for three weeks and then one day when you were bored to tears,
something would happen. Now that’s alright when you’re not that successful
, and when you’ve got loads or time, a cheap rehearsal room, maybe an
outside job. But when you’re on a record label and you’re starting to sell
records, and you’re in demand to tour, you don’t have all the time in the
world. Now, if I wanted to write a really good track, I reckon on going
down to the studio tonight and tomorrow night, three nights in succession, I
could come out with something, and that’s a great feeling. So this
inspirational way of writing became a real frustration when we went to New
York, because we told him the way we wrote was to jam, so he put us in this
demo studio for two weeks , and we didn’t come up with a fucking thing. It
was real embarrassing. To us it made sense, cos with Joy Division and maybe
early New Order, we’d jam, and listen to maybe three hours of tapes,
compiled over three weeks, and there’d be maybe thirty seconds somewhere,
and we’d expand from that. Of course, to Arthur, this was three hours of
garbage. It wasn’t his way of working at all. He was flabbergasted, and we
were embarrassed.
And the record didn’t really happen, did it?
No. Another thing was that he had this session musician, who at the time was
John Robie and he’d work with the band and the band would supply the ideas
, John Robie would perform them and Arthur would mix them, but we were so
uppy. It was very difficult to get the band to work with anyone else. To
have a session musician playing with us was absolutely abhorrent, so we
refused point blank, but then we didn’t come up with the goods. It made me
realise that maybe we did come up with some great inspirational music, but
those times were far too irregular. And at the end of the day, we weren’t
good enough musicians. That was the taste that was left in my mouth. We
couldn’t come up with great tracks at will.
Did you have any sense of Ian’s power as a performer?
No. In the same way that we never spoke about our ideas and theories about
music, and our inspiration, we never discussed, or thought about, Ian’s
lyrics. Or Ian’s performance. Again, I can only speak for myself, I felt
that if I thought about his lyrics or his performance, then it would stop. A
kind of superstition, really, I suppose. I thought, if something great is
happening, don’t look at the sun, don’t look at the sun.
Did you follow any particular guitarists?
Punk. I’m a pretty laid back person, I’m not hyper by any means, and to
play that way, you have to be hyper or aggressive or mad, so it didn’t
really work out. Then I developed my own style, which was slow and
considered. I liked sound, and I used to play on the neck of the guitar
where it sounded really nice. On keyboard I used to play notes that sounded
nice together, in a very naive way. I thought, if everyone else is doing it
the way you’re supposed to, then why don’t I come at things from a
different angle…I still don’t know how to play chords on a keyboard, I
just do what sounds nice to my ears. It isn’t cos I’m stupid. I could
learn how to do it, but I think I’ve got a strange kind of vantage point.
I’m more rhythm and chords, and Hooky was melody. He’s got a really good
talent for melody. He’s got this powerful, barbaric part of his personality
that people like. Father God of Thunder, or whatever. A strident quality
that comes out in the music.
But after the first New Order album, it became such a formula… Joy Division
had a formula, but it was never premeditated. It came out very naturally.
Hooky used to play high lead bass because I used to like my guitar to sound
distorted, and the amplifier I had would only work when it was turned full
volume. So when Hooky played low, he couldn’t hear himself. So this chain
of events derived the sound. Steve has his own style of drumming which is
different to other drummers. To me, a drummer in a band is the clock. But
Steve wouldn’t be the clock, because he’s passive, and he would follow the
rhythm of the band, which gave us our own edge. As a guitarist I could feel
that. Then live, we might be driven along by watching Ian dance. We were
watching Ian getting into it, and we were playing to him, visually, dancing.
Unfortunately, when Ian died, the formula didn’t work anymore. I really don
’t like the first New Order album, but it wasn’t fun recording it, so
maybe my judgement is coloured by that. There was no point in sounding like
Joy Division without Ian. Again, it was like the first set of material
before Unknown Pleasures, Movement was like that as far as I’m concerned.
But it went out. I didn’t have any faith in it, and you’ve got to have
faith in what you’re doing.
I think you really got going with Everything’s Gone Green…
It was Giorgio Morodor that influenced that. I guess what got me into dance
music was that I was really depressed after Ian died, very unhappy, and
disillusioned, because we’d spent an enormous amount of work, of sweat and
emotion on Joy Division, trying to get somewhere. Remember I said about
getting my first job being a real horrific experience. I felt I had to
wriggle out of it like a snake. Well I felt like I’d done a lot of fucking
wriggling, and just got out of it, and it had all caved in, that I didn’t
have any future. So I was listening to Berlin, by Lou Reed, Street Hassle,
really heavy, sad, down music. I guess for a long time after Ian died I was
really depressed and sad. Then I started smoking draw, I don’t know why. I
found when I was smoking draw that electronic music sounded great, and I
started taking acid, but stuff like Berlin didn’t. It sounded okay, but it
didn’t pep me up. I discovered a new quality in music, which was to pep you
up. Which was exactly what I needed at that time. So Mark Reader from
Berlin used to send me over electro music: E=MC2 by Giorgio Morodor, Donna
Summer albums, early Italian disco records. This new kind of music had a
wonderful effect on me. I loved the precision of it, cos I’m a real techno-
head. I love machinery, I love electronics. I love the precise little blips,
and I find the music very attractive, although I found disco vocals a bit
off-putting. I suddenly thought, this is the birth of a new kind of music.
Ian had been into it, because he used to play Trans-Europe Express before we
went onstage as Joy Division. He loved Kraftwerk, and Donna Summer kind of
disco music, apart from the Stooges and the Velvet Underground.
Did you go to Spin Inn?
Just after the period we’re talking about now, I used to go to Spin Inn and
get a lot of gay disco records. So Mark Reader, I can’t thank enough, cos
he got me really interested in electronic music, and suddenly this was the
new direction, and Kraftwerk was a big influence. They were about everything
that I naturally found interesting, which was technology. I’m quite a
spiritual person, but I love technology. My grandfather was an engineer, and
his father was an inventor, and I don’t know if I’ve got something in my
genes, but I can look at any machine, and pull it apart and put it back
together again. I love it. I get a kind of valium effect when I do that, it
makes me very calm. So this music was right up my street.
Then when we went down to London, Kevin Millens (?) who promoted a lot of
Joy Division gigs in London had come out of promoting and started doing gay
clubs around London. He did Heaven, still does some nights there. We’d ring
him and say Kevin, what’s happening tonight? And we’d go down and check
out the sounds. Of course, it was when music was ceasing to be disco, and
starting to be hi-NRG, electro, that kind of thing. Basically, we were first
starting to hear computer music. I got the idea for the bass drum sound on
Blue Monday from Heaven. There was a thing by The Twins, try and check it
out. Then the next step was we went to play in New York a lot, the Fun House
and Paradise Garage, and there was a New York version of that electro,
Puerto Rican sound, gay disco and electro influence. It was a mixture of
dope, acid, and clubs. We’d be in New York, sleep during the day, we’d get
an alarm call for half past eleven at night, meet in someone’s room, we’d
all drop a tab of acid except for Rob, and this friend Michael Schamberg
would drive, and Rob would be our coat stand in the club. We’d go to about
five clubs in a night. Rob would stand at one end of the bar, and we’d hang
our coats on him, and we’d all just go mad. Very much how people get
turned on by E these days. It happened with us with acid in 1982. Not
Gillian. of course who has always been very anti-drugs, if you know what I
mean.
To go back to Ian, was there any early sign of things starting to go wrong?
Like I said, he had this explosive personality. Mister polite, Mister Nice,
and suddenly before anyone realised, onstage, about the third song in, and
you’d notice he’d gone a bit weird, started pulling the stage apart,
ripping up the floorboards and throwing them at the audience or something.
Then by the end of the set he would be completely and utterly manic. Then
you’d come offstage and he’d be covered in blood, going, fucking hell,
what happened then? But no-one would talk about it, because that was our way
. We didn’t talk about things, we thought it was best if we left them. So
we accepted it, we didn’t question it. We didn’t think he knew why he got
himself worked up that way. One day we were doing a gig at the Hope & Anchor
. I had flu, I was really ill, and they had to come and drag me out of bed.
I remember every time Steve hit the cymbals, something happened to me, and
the whole room turned upside down on me. Literally, in my head, my eyes
turned upside down. It was horrible. Only about twenty people there. We were
in Steve’s car on the way home, and we got near Luton, and I was really
ill, shivering, covered in a sleeping bag, and Ian was sat in the front, I
was in the middle at the back. Ian just grabbed the sleeping back and pulled
it off. He’d been moaning about the gig, about the audience and the sound.
He was in a really negative mood. So he grabs the sleeping bag off me and I
grab it back, saying, stop fucking about, and he grabbed it again, and
covered himself with it, covered his head with it, and started growling,
like a dog. It was scary. What are you doing? You’re behaving like a twat,
what are you doing. He suddenly starts lashing out, punching the windscreen,
growling, and then he just went into a full overblown fucking red state fit
, in the car. We pulled over on the hard shoulder, it was about two in the
morning, dragged him out of the car, held him down. We thought he was
messing about at first. Then we got him back in the car and did about a
hundred mile an hour to the nearest hospital. Somewhere near Luton. We were
in this horrible casualty ward, I remember the guy next to Ian had done an
overdose, was having his stomach pumped. Ian was under observation, I don’t
know what they were doing. And the guy said, you’ve had a fit, you better
go see a doctor when you get back.
We went back, and the doctor told him, you either get epilepsy when you’re
born, or you get it in your early twenties, and Ian unfortunately got the
news that he had just got epilepsy. Well, we thought, maybe it was just a
one-off, but it wasn’t. He got it really badly. It ended up with him having
fits onstage. We did two gigs in one night, with the Stranglers, then the
Moonlight club. At the first gig he started dancing, like he did, but he
didn’t stop at the end of the song. We were trying to stop the song, and he
was dancing faster and faster, went into a spin, and he span into the drums
and knocked the drum kit over. We realised he was having a fit and we had
to carry him offstage, back to the dressing room. By the time we got him to
the dressing room he’d come out of it, and he just broke down in tears. He
was ashamed cos it had happened. He was so upset, he just said, leave me
alone. We left him in the dressing room for about half an hour, and we didn
’t know what to say, and we didn’t know what to do. It was really sad. And
of course there were all these fucking ghouls outside the dressing room,
trying to find out what had happened. But we managed to threaten them. After
that, he had serious doubts about his future. Eventually he decided he
wanted to leave the band. This is after Closer. Quite understandably. Who
wants that to happen to them onstage?
We came to an agreement. He wanted to leave the band, he wanted to buy a
corner shop down in Portsmouth, he wanted to go off and write a book. We
didn’t want him to, because we’d put so much work into it, but we
understood his predicament. The agreement was that he wouldn’t do any gigs
for a year, that we’d just write. But around this time, he would agree to
anything you told him. Ian was very open to suggestion at this time. He’d
made up his mind to leave the band. He was going to do something completely
different, and we said, no don’t do that. We’ll just record, take the
pressure off, and without any change of expression, he’d say, yeah, okay.
If we’d have told him to go and cut three of his fingers off, I think he
would have done it. He carried on having fits, then he had all the trouble
with Debbie and seeing Anique. That had happened during Closer. He had that
playing heavily on his mind, he didn’t know what to do. He was so
suggestible. He really wanted one of us to come up and tell him what to do,
and that would have been his way out. At that time I was into hypnotism.
Very into the occult. Not witchcraft and all that, by the other world. I
read a lot about astral projection… could literally put Ian under in four
minutes or so. Anyway, he was extremely suggestible, both in daily life and
also doing work in hypnotism.
Do you remember any of the past lives he got into?
Yeah. Later on he split up with his wife. Before he died he spent two weeks
at my house. I was trying to think of everything I could. He tried to commit
suicide, he took an overdose, and then he came out of hospital to do a gig
in Preston. It was a disaster…
I have a tape of that.
No, sorry. Prestwich. Preston was a disaster but it was funny. Prestwich was
a disaster because there were all these like football hooligans, and we had
to pull Ian out of a psychiatric hospital, because he’d been committed
after trying to commit suicide, and he had to come out, play the gig, and go
back to the hospital after the gig. But he came to the gig and he couldn’t
go on, so Simon Topping went on instead of him, and the crowd freaked, and
a full scale riot went on. Twinny our roadie got a bottle over his head,
loads of people got bottled. Ian saw this, and of course it was all his
fault, so he just broke down again, went back to hospital, he was in a
complete fucking state.
He was in hospital for maybe another four days. He came out, told his wife
what was going on. I think his wife already knew what was going on. He
needed to get out, so he stayed at my house for two weeks. During that time
I tried to drum it into him what a stupid thing it was to take an overdose.
I’d read that in hypnotic regression, if you have a problem in current life
, when you regress you’ll go back to a past life, and in that past life you
will have an experience that relates to your present day problem, and it
will cure it. So I thought, I know how to hypnotise him, Ian is in a mess,
might as well try it, and he went back to exactly the same lives that he’d
gone back to when I hypnotised him at the rehearsal room.
One was a kind of pagan battlefield which was just pure horror. Bodies and
limbs everywhere, horror flashing past his eyes. Then there was blackness.
Then it was the Hundred Years War, between Britain and France, and he was a
mercenary. I know this sounds like I’m some kind of tripped out crusty. Why
it sounds dodgy sometimes is that even if you know its absolutely true,
like when we talk about Helen. If she’s given you absolute proof, you know
its true. So you talk about Helen as if it is true, but to someone who has
not seen her, it seems like you’ve been taken in. Everybody’s a doubting
Thomas until they experience it themselves.
Isn’t it more interesting not to doubt?
It is yeah, but most people who read your article are going to doubt
immediately what we say in this section, so we’ve got to be very careful
how we phrase it.
Anyway, it was the Hundred Years War, and he was in a prison in Spain. He
was an English mercenary, and he’d been caught along with another guy, and
he spent the rest of his life, to the day he died, in this dungeon in Spain,
with this other guy. The third one was this Victorian library, and he was
surrounded by books, and he loved books and he loved reading, and that was
it.
You can hear that in something like Dead Souls…
I never analysed the lyrics. I won’t do it until I stop being a musician.
When I stop being a musician, I’m going to read them all.
But did you like the feel of it?
I loved it, yeah. I loved Colony as well. Colony was about Heart of Darkness
. I taped it as well. There was a tape of it knocking around for a while
after he died, but its long gone now.
What struck me was it was so easy to put in a trance, he just wanted someone
. His solution to his problems was to get rid of him, so that he wouldn’t
have any more problems. His reaction to a problem was rage, but not in a
horrible macho kind of way. It was fire, he was a human blowtorch, and he’d
burn you out of his way with his rage. Now his other solution was that
someone would come along and play God, tell him what to do. And you can’t
do that with a person’s life.
Just before he died, were we were loath to advise him, because whatever we’
d said, he would have just done it, and you can’t be responsible for
another person’s future, and their past as well. I remain convinced to this
day that if someone is going to commit suicide, they’re gonna do it, no
matter what the fuck anyone says to them. Ian was gonna do it. Apparently
according to Debbie, he’d talked about doing it years ago. Someone you
should interview, who was this dark, shadowy figure for us, was Ian’s
schoolmate, or after schoolmate. Ian really had a fondness for him. He had a
[indistinct] so he went off to be a performance artist down in Bournemouth.
Debbie will know about him. I wouldn’t mind knowing his name, actually, if
you find out. Him and his mate had a suicide pact. I think one of their
dads came back and found that they’d both OD’d or something, when they
were at school together. Or they’d done something real bad, and they had
this pact. We played in Bournemouth once, his mate, who he’d always gone on
about who was this performance artist who used to like chain himself to
cars and do all that weird shit, didn’t turn up at the gig and Ian was
really upset about it. Really pissed off. It was on the Buzzcocks tour. He
didn’t turn up and he went real fuckin’ weird after it. We were staying in
this shitty boarding house and the Buzzcocks were staying in this shitty
hotel, and we walked along to their hotel for a drink, and coming back along
the beach - this was before Ian had started having fits - Ian starting
walking out towards the sea. It was pitch black, about one in the morning,
and he went walking out into the sea, and we had to go and get him. He had a
shadow on his personality, that was so dark that I don’t think even he
could see into it.
You spoke about wanting to be this channel or medium for something to come
through…
It wasn’t spiritualism, it was intuition.
Did Ian have it?
I don’t honestly know. We would never have discussed it because it would
have stopped the flow. He was a writer. He would always have a file box with
him, full of lyrics. He’d sit at home and just write all the time, instead
of watching telly, he’d stay up - I don’t know this, I’m surmising,
because he’d come in with reams and reams of lyrics.
Did Ian flirt with the dark, or was he afraid of it?
He loved it. He was interested in the extremes of life, as I said earlier.
The sick part of life. I don’t mean that he was into devil worship or
anything like that, he wasn’t even into spiritualism or anything like that.
If we were writing a song he would say, let’s make it more manic! It’s
too straight, let’s make it more manic.
Was he the guiding force in the band?
He never wrote any music, he wrote the lyrics and the vocal, but he was a
great orchestrator, director. He gave us direction. I’d arrange the songs,
we all wrote the music, but Ian would give us the direction. And he was very
passionate at those moments. And we really missed that when he died.
Suddenly we didn’t have any eyes. We had everything else, but we couldn’t
see where we were going.
Why do you think he did it then? Was it the American tour?
It was the breakdown of his relationship…accentuated by the quantity of
barbiturates he was taking to subdue his epilepsy. Barbiturates make you so
you’re laughing on minute, crying the next. He’d had a physical breakdown,
a relationship breakdown, which caused an emotional breakdown. Mentally,
apart from this strange suggestibility, which I don’t really think anyone
else noticed, he was all over the place.
Do you think that film had anything to do with it?
I don’t think so, no. It was more me that was under that. That’s another
thing that’s got twisted by time. Just before Joy Division I was working in
this animation place, and my best friend there was very into Werner Herzog.
He got me into Werner Herzog, and I used to take Ian to see his films.
Obviously I don’t know what impression they had on him.
Do you think he was worried about the American tour?
No. If it had been me, I would have been extremely worried, but if we agreed
that we were going to keep the band together, but we weren’t going to do
gigs anymore, how come a month later we were going on an American tour? It
wasn’t right.
People start getting all the wrong priorities once you start becoming
successful. They don’t know when to leave you alone and give you a fucking
rest. You need more than one kind of sleep in this profession. If people can
smell money, they won’t leave you alone. They won’t take no for an answer
. Talk about Nirvana - my immediate sympathies go out to his family,
whatever you think of his wife as an artist or as a rock’n'roll chick…
I think there’s always another reason that nobody knows, why they do it.
There’s all the public reasons, but there’s another reason. That last
section of a personality that no-one knows about.
I think we’ve all thought of committing suicide at some time or other, but
it’s such a violent thing to do. It is a violent thing. It also really
hurts other people that are close to you, so its a real selfish thing. I
hate to call someone who’s done it selfish because they must be going
through so much pain to cause them to do that, to call them selfish is an
injustice, but the people around you, it hurts them so much that no matter
what you’re going through…
I suppose when he died it must have brought back all your other losses..
Yeah. It was horrible. The worst one was a couple of years ago, where I had
to go to see my grandmother, who was in a home, and tell her that my mother
was dead, and that I was the only one left, again. I was thirty six, I could
handle it. When I was sixteen, I couldn’t.
How did you deal with it after Ian?
At the time I remember going very silent, not being able to speak very much.
Just feeling very down. I think it makes you very hard. I feel now that I’
m quite cold, and when I was a child I was very warm. Now I can be quite
cold and detached. I can never really make close friendships, just because
everything I’ve ever been close to has died. If I make good friends, but
not really close, and something happens, its not a big deal, I can handle it
. But you’ve got to handle it, there’s nothing else you can do. You can’t
go to bits. I can’t go to bits, cos there more to my story than I’m
telling you. My mother was disabled and I couldn’t go to bits because no-
one could look after her, only me. So I had to hold the pressure in and
control it. Which in New Order, musically, I got a lot of resentment for,
but that’s another story.
Has it taken you a long time to come to terms with Ian’s death?
No, I came to terms with it pretty well straight away, because it was the
third one. I knew why he’d done it. Or I could put my own reason on why I
thought he’d done it. Why I would have done it. And I kind of just accept
these things now, in that, if its going to happen, it’s going to happen.
People die all the time, as they say.
Also I really don’t believe that it ends there. Apart from Helen.
Have you felt Ian’s presence at any time since?
A couple of things happened to me… I had an astral projection, which was
totally unexpected, around the early eighties, which was fantastic. It didn
’t show me Ian, but it showed me eternity. I was in a hotel in London and I
had an astral projection. I went over to the window and looked at the
street outside, and there was someone behind me. They didn’t say anything
but it said, observe everything in front of you. It said, look, for the rest
of eternity, there is nothing for you to worry about. I got this feeling of
total happiness. I felt that I’d been shown eternity, so it wasn’t so
important when something bad happens to me, these days.
Since then, my life has really improved. I had a great childhood. My mother
was really strict, but living with my grandparents in Salford I had a really
good laugh. It was a good, colourful introduction to my life. From when I
started work until Ian died and until I was about thirty, was hell. Tainted
water. But now I’ve got control of my life, there’s a lot of happy
elements in my life. I got so used to having problems through my twenties
that I’m almost looking for a problem to grasp hold of now. To make me feel
like a human being. There’s only one thing I’m dissatisfied with now, and
I’ve learned to live without it.
Can you tell me about Ian’s haircut?
He used to have this really thick hair, and he used to go to this dodgy
barber’s, and he used to ask the barber to cut his hair like a Roman
emperor. We used to be quite into the Romans. He used to read a lot of
Nietzsche, I don’t know, I never read it. I just thought they were
beautiful uniforms, and beautiful architecture. So aesthetically I was
always attracted to classicism. Ian liked it through Nietzsche…
When was the last time you saw him?
It was the night before, the Friday night. It was Saturday he died, wasn’t
it. No, sorry, I saw him on the Thursday. The Friday night we went out with
this lad I used to work with, who was completely mad, called Paul Dawson,
who called himself The Amazing Noswad. He was a psycho. We took him out to
observe him. I know it sounds horrible, but we were fascinated by this lad,
he was like our treasure. We took him out for a drink. I was supposed to see
him the next night, but he rang up and told me he was going to see Debbie.
He said he’d meet me the next day, cos we were going to go over to a friend
’s house near Blackpool. We were going to go water ski-ing. But he never
turned up, and I went water ski-ing anyway. I came back to my friend’s
house and I was drying myself off with a towel, and the phone rang, and it
was Rob. It was Larry’s house or Paul’s house, out of Section 25. He said,
I’ve got a bit of bad news for you. I’m afraid Ian’s committed suicide.
You mean he’s tried to kill himself? No, he’s done it. And it was like the
cymbals at that gig. The whole room just turned upside down. I put the
phone down, went and washed my face with cold water. Then I got back on the
phone, and took it like a man, I suppose. Drove back to Manchester.
Do you feel that Ian is still with you in any way?
I did have this rather scary experience in the bedroom where this fucking
dark figure came into the room. That was pretty frightening. I thought that
might have been Ian, cos it was the night Johnny met Helen, and the next
night Johnny came to me with a message for me from Ian… but no, to tell you
the truth I was kind of turned off the mysticism since Ian died, and I’ve
never hypnotised anyone since, because I always thought, what if me
hypnotising him had anything to do with his death? It couldn’t have done,
from what I did, but you always think there’s some in you to blame for his
death. So I turned away from all of it, until I went to see Helen. I did
actually, at the first few New Order gigs, sort of say, come on, give me a
hand here.
And did he?
I can’t remember.
Do you think in any sense that in the search for extremes of experience, in
the search to make art, that you were - and I was in a different way -
playing with stuff that you didn’t know how to control?
In Joy Division? No. I felt that even though we were expecting this music to
come out of thin air, we never, any of us, interested in the money it might
make us. We just wanted to make something that was beautiful to listen to,
and stirred our emotions. We weren’t interested in a career, or any of that
. We never planned one single day. I don’t think we were messing with
things that we shouldn’t have done, because our reasons were honourable.
Posted on September 24, 2008 at 6:21 pm
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Ian
him
【在 l*y 的大作中提到】
: www.jonsavage.com/film
: Bernard Sumner
: [interview, April 1994]
: Bernard onstage
: Bernard Albrecht Sumner
: I first met Ian at a gig at the Electric Circus. It might have been the
: Anarchy tour, it might have been The Clash, or one of them punk groups. Ian
: was with another lad called Ian, and they both had donkey jackets, and Ian
: had “HATE” written on the back of his donkey jacket. I remember liking him
: . He seemed pretty nice, but we didn’t talk to him that much. I just
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