Let’s start with a story. It’s the only one in the book that includes a Hollywood actress, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and a mushroom vol-au-vent, so it’s unique in that regard. On the other hand it’s got a few other themes that’ll be cropping up as we go along (girls, cocaine, Barney being a twat . . .) so it’s a good one to set the scene.
It starts in 1985 when New Order were told, firstly that John Hughes was using two of our songs for his new film, Pretty in Pink, and secondly that he wanted a new track written especially for the movie to replace them.
So that was good. Unfortunately, somebody came up with the bright idea of getting the new song produced by John Robie and, oh man, back then I hated John Robie with a passion. He could sometimes be what you would call a very interesting/difficult character. We’d met him on the ‘Confusion’ session with Arthur Baker in New York. But, as my roadie mate Twinny said, ‘He’s not one of us, Hooky.’
When we were mixing his version of ‘Sub-culture’ at the Village Recorder, a studio in Santa Monica, California (where Fleetwood Mac had recorded Tusk, the most expensive album ever made, costing over $1 million dollars, although we would eventually eclipse that with one of our own), he had impressive bravado when it came to girls, something I could only dream of. He would approach girls in restaurants, clubs etc., offering them the chance to do some backing vocals on a track he was recording with ‘New Order, a group from Eeengerland’. They always said yes, so every night we’d have a studio full of giggling airheads, with certain members of our entourage (a phrase you shall be reading a lot during this book) all over them like a cheap suit.
Not only that, but it was my belief that in one fell swoop Robie had helped destroy a huge part of the magic of New Order, simply by telling Bernard, ‘You do realise this song’s not in your key, don’t you?’
Of course Bernard didn’t realise the song wasn’t in his key. None of us did. We didn’t know anything about stuff like that. We always wrote the music first, and what I’d always loved about Barney’s vocals was the unintentional strained quality as he tried to fit into the track. Like Ian, he wasn’t blessed with the world’s best singing voice, but it had emotion, passion, and to me the struggle in Bernard’s voice was a major part of the band’s appeal. (I agree with David Byrne, who said, ‘The better a singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.’)
Not after Robie. After he piped up, we always had to write in Bernard’s key. Not only that, but it marked a new awakening. Suddenly Bernard was thinking, Oh, there’s a right way of doing things? A proper way of doing things? and over time it got so that not only were we writing everything in the same one or two musical keys, but every song had to have a vocal verse, a vocal bridge, a vocal chorus, a vocal middle eight (that was different) and finish with a vocal double chorus. To me that went against everything we’d ever set out to achieve. We were about tearing up and rewriting the rulebook, not consulting it every five bloody minutes; we were punks, rebels.
If you ask me, the rules ended up blanding us out. They took us from writing great songs like ‘Blue Monday’, where we were building the sound we wanted – a unique sound, nine minutes long, and if anybody had told us, ‘You can’t do that,’ we would have told them to fuck off – to formulaic songs like ‘Jetstream’.
Anyway – spit – back to the winter of 1985, and because the rest of the band loved him, and he and Bernard were proper buddies, Robie flew over for the Pretty in Pink sessions at Yellow Two in Stockport, right across the road from Strawberry Studios. There, Robie spent his days pissing me off by removing my bass from ‘Shellshock’ and putting the line on strings instead. ‘You understand don’t you, Hooky,’ he’d smirk, while in the late evenings he swanned around the Haçienda.
We’d introduce him to girls then stand there aghast as he came out with lines like, ‘Oh, you’ve got a face like Botticelli’s Angel.’
‘Fuck off,’ they’d say.
In America he had women queuing up for him, but God bless those Manchester girls for giving him short shrift.
Robie had a strict studio routine. Every night at 8 p.m. he’d go upstairs to eat his pre-ordered Chinese takeaway. He’d sit in this funny little chair, all tied together with webbing, watch a bit of telly, eat his meal, and then return to the job of ruining New Order. One night the band were sitting upstairs after dinner and laughing about Robie always sitting in that particular chair when Barney suggested undoing the webbing, so it would collapse with him in it when he next sat down.
Brilliant, we thought, that’ll be funny.
So he did it and it was. It was really funny. But of course Robie had sussed that I didn’t like him, so when he fell through the chair and ended up with his Chinese all over himself, he blamed me. No matter how much I insisted I was an innocent bystander, he said he was going to get me back, get his revenge.
‘You wait, Hooky . . . You wait!’ he’d drawl, all New Yorky.
But he didn’t. Not during that session anyway. We finished ‘Shellshock’, gave it to John Hughes, and the next thing you know it was early 1986, and we were rolling up to the premiere of Pretty in Pink in Los Angeles at the Chinese Theatre. Psychedelic Furs were there, OMD, Echo and the Bunnymen, Suzanne Vega (who burst out crying because you could barely hear her track), loads of bands. Rob Gretton couldn’t come. There was the small matter of a cocaine-induced psychosis keeping him in a mental hospital. So it was me, Terry Mason, Steve and Gillian – and Bernard, who went with Robie, because you couldn’t get a cigarette paper between them by then; they were a right pair of bosom buddies, almost an item.
First up, we all watched the film, which featured ‘Thieves Like Us’ and ‘Elegia’ but only a six-second clip of ‘Shellshock’. John Hughes hadn’t replaced the old tracks. He obviously didn’t think ‘Shellshock’ was good enough, which I thought was hilarious and made a mental note to rag Robie about it later. Afterwards there was a nightclub reception where I got chatting to OMD, who I had not seen since their old Factory days, and I was complaining I felt jetlagged.
‘Come with me,’ came the invitation from one of their entourage. ‘I’ve got just the thing.’
Turned out his cure for jetlag was the biggest line of coke I’d ever seen, then another and another, until I was completely fucked. I’d not had much coke before, so the feeling was very strange. It was also before I drank a lot so there was nothing to lighten the load. It did have the desired effect of keeping me awake but had the undesired side-effect of turning me into a teeth-clenched twat. I felt like I had a very stiff pole stuck up my arse. It made me very quiet and starey. In no way did I deserve what happened next, as there was absolutely no provocation on my part.
What did happen next was that I was sitting opposite Molly Ringwald, staring, having a drink with Steve, Gillian and Terry, stiff as a pole (see above) when out of the corner of my eye I see Barney a few feet away, sort of sniggering. I was just thinking, Oh yeah, what’s that twat cooking up? when the next thing I knew, Robie was in front of me going, ‘Hey, Hooky, you remember that chair in Yellow Two?’ And he shoves a huge mushroom vol-au-vent right in my face.
I was in shock. Him and Barney walked off laughing and I just sat there as it dripped slowly down my face.
Now I had dressed up for the evening: a Crombie with a nice shirt and tie, very smart for me, and a face full of mushroom vol-au-vent was not exactly what I wanted to complete the look. It was one of those really creamy ones, all hot and sticky, and it got everywhere. As Steve, Gillian and Terry helped clean me up, I was still in shock and thinking, That was bang out of order. What Barney did was in the middle of Stockport, with only us lot there. And Robie goes and does that to me at the premiere of Pretty in Pink, right in front of Molly fucking Ringwald.
They all agreed. They were going, ‘Yeah, he’s a disgusting little twat. You should fucking hammer him, Hooky,’ and me all full of coke, was going, ‘Right, right, I’m going to fucking have that twat,’ and them, all three of them, were going, ‘Yeah, have him, have him.’
So by then I was wound up, right up, and the red mist descended. I was really on the warpath, and said, ‘Right, where is the little cunt? I’m going to fucking do him.’ I set off down the stairs to find him. Halfway down I spy Robie and Barney at the bottom, chatting up a couple of girls, going, ‘Oh, you two look like you could be backing singers . . .’
‘Hey you, y’twat,’ I said, and then, when he turned around, I nutted him. Bang. Right between the eyes, or so I thought – turned out it glanced him more on the cheek than anything else. But anyway, down he went like a sack of fucking spuds.
Oh my God. Total pandemonium. Psychedelic Furs legged it, OMD legged it, Suzanne Vega burst out crying again, and the two girls ran off screaming. The whole area cleared. Only Barney standing there, his jaw on the floor, then going, ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Hooky. That’s fucking disgusting, that is.’
‘And you, you twat,’ I said, ‘you say one more word and you’ll be fucking next!’ And I slowly turned – with Terry holding my coat like a butler gently putting it back on my shoulders – as we returned upstairs, where news of my exploits had spread. I spent the rest of the night shaking hands with people congratulating me on giving Robie exactly what he deserved. I was buzzing off my tits, feeling ten feet tall. A proper, coked-up little hard man. Yes.
Then, next morning:
Oh God, what have I done!
Terry came to my room, early. He had this habit of pulling at his wattle when he was nervous. ‘Bernard wants a group meeting, Hooky,’ he said, pulling at the wattle for all he was worth. ‘He’s not happy!’
Sure enough, Barney wasn’t happy. He was sat there in the beautiful Sunset Marquis Hotel with a face like a smacked arse, going, ‘It’s terrible what you did. It was disgusting. How could you, how could you?’
But I’d been getting phone calls all morning, notes pushed under my door: great news about Robie, inundated with people thanking me for nutting the twat. I was starting to feel a bit more vindicated and, instead of just sitting there taking it, I was like, ‘Listen, he’s a twat. He shouldn’t have done that to me anyway, putting a vol-au-vent in my face at a movie premiere in front of Molly fucking Ringwald when it was you who did the jape at Yellow Two in the first place, you twat.’
‘Well, it’s still disgusting,’ he said, all prim and proper. ‘You should go and apologise to him. You must apologise to him or I’m leaving the band.’
I said, ‘Apologise to him? I’ll rip his fucking head off.’
The trouble was, they all thought we needed Robie because he was still producing ‘Shame of the Nation’ and ‘Sub-Culture’ and without Rob Gretton we were a bit leaderless and worried about the American record company finding out about his nervous breakdown. So, for a quiet life, I agreed to say sorry, and went off to his room.
He opened the door, looking a bit bruised and very hangdog.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Listen, I came to say sorry about last night.’
‘OK,’ he nodded, ‘come in and sit down.’
I sat down. He looked at me, little wounded soldier. ‘What you did was really low, Hooky,’ he began.
And, oh Jesus, it was like being back at school. I felt the beginnings of a new anger brewing as he started laying it on thick about what a dirty, lowdown dog I was, calling me cowardly even, hitting him with a sucker punch – until I couldn’t take it any more, and exploded.
‘Listen. You showed me up at a red-carpet premiere in front of Molly fucking Ringwald, right. As far as I’m concerned, that’s fucking assault with a deadly weapon, mate.’
He went, ‘Well you did that chair to me. You did that chair . . .’
I said, ‘I didn’t fucking do the chair, you fucking bald dwarf. I didn’t do the chair. It was Barney that did the fucking chair. Jesus!’
He was angry now. ‘Well, anyway, I think you’re an asshole, and it was really low what you did.’
I said, ‘Right, you fucking twat. Come on, outside now, I’m going to smash your fucking teeth in. In the corridor, now!’
He didn’t move. I’d blown it again.
I stormed out, slamming his door, kicking the walls, absolutely seething. I returned to my room and hit the minibar with all the force of a mini-hurricane. I decided that was it. I’d had enough of the band, because this was as bad as it was going to get. I was leaving. I went to tell Steve and Gillian. They said they were leaving too!
Fuck me. Surely this was as bad as it was going to get?
Oh, how wrong I turned out to be.