It was Michael Shamberg’s idea to record with producer Arthur Baker in 1983. Initially he approached Arthur for a remix of ‘5.8.6.’ or ‘Blue Monday’, but Arthur declined in favour of writing something new.
‘Arthur is changing the world! Like you!’ Michael yelled at Rob. ‘You should do a song together.’
New Order were making what you might call white dance music, but Arthur Baker, with Afrika Bambaataa and Planet Patrol, was making much more, dare we say, dark, dance music, a lot funkier. He was pioneering the use of the Roland 808 drum machine, and we didn’t have one of those yet, but we really liked the sound of it; we were still using the Oberheim DMX. He was also using sequencers in a similar fashion, so there was a big crossover, a lot of common ground, and I could see why Michael, Rob and the others were dead excited about it.
Me?
I’d rather have stayed at home and rocked. I was very set in my ways when I was young. We’d written Power, Corruption & Lies, Movement, Closer and Unknown Pleasures all on our own, why did we need anybody else?
What’s more, we didn’t have any new material and we had never before done anything with no song idea, completely unprepared.
Through Michael, Arthur suggested we start work at Fred Zarr’s studio in Brooklyn, and get a track going. This was the first time we’d ever done anything like this, we simply didn’t know what to do, and we were scared. We presumed that Arthur would be there with us and we could do our usual thing of jamming while he picked out the bits he liked – our idea of ‘getting a track going’ was Arthur fulfilling the all-important Ian Curtis role.
We got to New York, went in the studio. No Arthur. He was busy finishing off a track with another English band, Freeez, the track being ‘I.O.U.’, which was to become a huge hit for him.
OK, fine. So we did what we always did when we wrote. We jammed. We jammed and we jammed and we jammed and we jammed, and the tower of tapes was getting higher and higher and higher and higher, and all the time we were wondering when Arthur was going to arrive so he could listen to them. Poor bastard, we thought.
For two or three days we did that, until at last he turned up, breezing in like a huge grizzly bear, long dark hair, long beard, every inch the New Yawker he is.
Now, I know Arthur well, still do, and he’s never changed from that day to this. The only difference is that he now has a bit more grey in his hair, but otherwise he’s the same larger-than-life character he’s always been, a wonderful guy. I love him to death.
So he comes in, takes over. ‘How’s it going, man? How’s it going? I’m Arthur, Arthur Baker. What’s happening? What have you got for me?’
Proud as punch, we pointed at our tower of tapes.
He looked at it. And the bit of him you could still see between the beard and the hair went pale as he looked at these hours and hours of New Order jam tapes – at which point it became clear that our idea of ‘getting a track together’ and his idea of ‘getting a track together’ were two entirely different things. No doubt he was as ‘Confused’ as we were, ha! But you had to hand it to him. He was very decisive. Straight away he said, ‘Right, OK, forget that. We’ll go straight in the studio and we’ll write something there.’
So that’s what we did. And it was wild.
The thing was that in those days all the studios in America were running twenty-four hours a day, especially in New York, and were booked solid in eight-hour sessions. So we’d literally be trooping up the stairs while a bunch of guys, in our case James Brown, were coming down having just finished their session. Once inside, it was just Arthur and his engineer, who had the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen – huge, bulging, scary eyes, they were.
What I soon realised about Arthur was that the way he recorded and produced was very ‘punky’. He’d sit at the desk and everything would be zero, infinity at unity level.
But two minutes later it was all up to full. It was like him putting his foot down in a car and not stopping for anything. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing, but he was just going to do it anyway. He was really enjoying himself and it was infectious.
Then, when Arthur ran out of steam, he’d be sitting there sweating like he’d just run a marathon, and the engineer would back everything down again. So scary eyes had the job of turning it all down when it got so massively distorted that you couldn’t hear anything. Then Arthur would start again, searching for the perfect mix.
To put it another way, Arthur was fucking bonkers.
Tell you who wasn’t so keen, though: Steve. Arthur had his TR808 drum machine going and Steve couldn’t get near it. It was like Arthur had sharpened elbows keeping him off that thing, meaning that Steve – the band’s drummer – didn’t get a look-in, didn’t get to play any of the drums on ‘Confusion’. Arthur did the lot.
Steve was really, really upset about it and even slunk off at one point. But of course, the devil in me was going, ‘Ha! Well now you know what it was like for me when you three did ‘5.8.6.’, y’twat!’ It really is dog eat dog in a group.
Meantime, Arthur was working out great for me. I was in the studio playing with all the gear they had in there – loads of keyboards, set-ups for both bass and guitar, all of it live and plugged in – and I was playing a sort of one-fingered bassline that Arthur heard and went, ‘That’s good, that’s good. Give me that, give me that.’
He took it off me, programmed it and, lo and behold, it became the bassline to ‘Confusion’.
The next minute you know we’ve got this bass synth going and Arthur was doing loads and loads of different rhythms on the 808. I played a melody line on the keyboard and he took that as well and programmed it up, then Bernard got some more keyboard lines, using some as ideas for the vocal. Then, at Arthur’s insistence, we all chanted ‘Confusion’ then, ‘ratatatatatatatta hey!’ with great gusto, even Rob. Then me and Bernard swapped so I played guitar on the track and he played bass. Then I added another ‘Hooky bassline’ on at the end, again at Arthur’s absolute insistence, with him saying, ‘That’s New Order to me, man!’ And that was it.
That was ‘Confusion’.
It had bags of me on it. It was fantastic. I was delighted. It was fun working with other people. Who’d have thought it?
When he finished recording for the night, Arthur would take a tape over to a club called the Fun House, where they had a tape machine, so, as well as playing records, the DJs could play studio mixes. What him and the club’s resident DJ John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez used to do was sneak early mixes of their production work into the set to gauge the effect it had on the crowd. If it worked and people dug it, they knew they were on to something. If it didn’t work, and everyone started drifting off, they knew the track needed attention.
He did it with ‘Confusion’, and by all accounts it tore the roof off. After that we all agreed – even Steve – that the recording had been a great success.
We’d done well with ‘Confusion’ and Arthur wanted to do one more track. One night he was on his way to the studio and saw the words ‘Thieves Like Us’ sprayed on a wall in Brooklyn, which he really liked as a title. We had an eight-bar idea but we never got the time to work on it because ‘Confusion’ took so long. So ‘Thieves Like Us’ would have to wait for another time.
We ended up staying in New York for about three weeks – including the recording. We were in the Iroquois again and even had our own rooms, no crew with us this time, you see, which was great because I was back to having a full-on love affair with Miss Polsky, living it up at Danceteria and Hurrah every night, straight in, no queue, free drinks tickets once we got inside, cock of the walk.
Then, next thing you knew, it snowed. Three feet of snow in Manhattan and the whole city ground to a halt. The place was like a surreal alien landscape undisturbed by anything that normally moved. It was great. You just slipped your way round Manhattan from coffee shop to hotel to nightclub. We were marooned, with Arthur, Michael and Ruth keeping us entertained, living it up every night and sleeping during the day.
Interestingly, in the Red Flame on 44th Street (our coffee shop of choice) we had noticed something strange was happening to our bills. We would all ask for separate bills and they would often read $4.38 or $5.15 but when we went to pay it would be $5.38 and then $6.15. We were very puzzled but, being English, with that famous reserve, it took us a while to work up the courage to mention to the girl on the till. It fell to Barney, tight-arse being the most perturbed.
‘Excuse me, miss, there seems to be a mistake on the bill. It’s for a dollar more.’ She looked him up and down and said, ‘Listen, you guys are so mean we’ve taken to putting our tips on your bill. OK? There ain’t no way you miserable limeys are gonna pay it otherwise, is there?’ she snarled.
We had to agree there. Ah, those infamous cultural differences.
I remember being taken to an Afrika Bambaataa gig somewhere on Times Square and it went off with all the gangs fighting inside, a really heavy scene, and we were going, ‘Fucking hell, this is a bit heavy, Arthur,’ and he went, ‘Oh man, it’s always like this. This is what it’s like. This is New York.’ Strangely, something else we would be enjoying, against our will, in the Haçienda very soon.
It was a great time and a wonderful place to be. The atmosphere was fantastic.
Back on tour in Sweden that February, our Salford Van Hire Transit van developed a fault. I couldn’t figure out what it was. The clutch linkage seemed broken, but it was beyond my expertise. It needed to go into the garage. We were staying in a very strange guesthouse on the outskirts of Stockholm, in what seemed like a sanatorium. We could see patients being walked round the grounds in their pyjamas. Barney wanted to do his laundry and asked to be taken to a launderette. I explained about going into town later to drop the van off at the garage and suggested he do it after that.
He was accompanied by Duncan Haysom, the New Order bootlegger he had taken under his wing, who was accompanying us on the tour. We set off and, as we got in the centre and the traffic got heavier, the van was becoming harder to drive. Rob was screaming at me to keep going, smoke everywhere. As we stopped at a set of lights Barney shouts, ‘Look, a launderette,’ and promptly opened the door to get out.
I was going, ‘Eh! Eh! Don’t get out. Do it after the van. We can’t stop,’ but he ignored me and disappeared, closely followed by Duncan.
Rob was screaming, ‘Drive! Drive! We’ll get him later.’ So I did just that and we limped through the centre and on to the garage. We swapped the van but when we got back to the centre we couldn’t find the launderette or either of the likely lads.
After a couple of hours we gave up. Remember, there were no mobiles or sat navs in those days, and began the long drive back to the sanatorium. There, Twinny said to me, ‘Come on, let’s jape Barney’s room,’ so we all went in his room, moved his bed out on the balcony, took out the light bulbs and suspended a bucket of water over the door for when they returned.
Then we went to Rob’s room next door to wait. Five hours later and it was going dark and still no sign of them. Then it struck us we were in the middle of nowhere, they didn’t speak Swedish, how the hell were they going to get back?
Another couple of hours passed and a cry went up, ‘They’re here!’ We heard them come up the stairs, gripped by excitement. As they went in their room we heard the splash of the bucket falling, closely followed by, ‘You bastards.’
Then Rob’s door was kicked open and with a blood-curdling scream Barney dived full length, and landed on Rob with his hands round his throat. Oops, we didn’t bargain for this. Rob kicked him to the opposite wall, next to the sink, where Barney slid to the floor. Still screaming, he reached over and grabbed a big bar of soap off the basin, took a massive bite then spat it out and sat on the floor blowing bubbles.
I turned to Twinny and said, ‘Let’s leave these two lovers alone, eh?’
Turned out him and Duncan had ended up getting a train from Stockholm then walking for hours to the sanatorium. I have to say his clothes were immaculate and he smelled and looked lovely.
The next day we found an open-air swimming pool that was full of topless women.
What a lovely afternoon. A rather dishevelled-looking English group enjoyed an afternoon’s swimming and sunbathing. Even Barney cheered up. Although the strange sight of Steve and Gillian, both dressed head to toe in black, sat on the terrace in the sunshine with their cases like two out-of-place bats, will live with me forever.
We returned home, tired and happy, for the release of ‘Blue Monday’.
It came out without much fanfare. No promotion by us at all. Radio I wouldn’t consider it. At nearly eight minutes and in twelve-inch format only, they wouldn’t even listen. It was just too long.
‘Cut it down to three minutes,’ they said, ‘and we’ll think about it.’
‘Piss off!’ we said.
We were happy to try anything in those days. For example, when it came to mastering ‘Blue Monday’ we took our 1610 U-matic cassette to Strawberry Mastering Studios in Victoria, where we told the engineer, Ravi, that we wanted it to sound like ‘Cocaine’ by Dillinger. Ian loved that track – we all did – especially the sweet distortion on it. ‘That’s how we want it to sound, all distorted like that,’ was what we told Ravi, who did everything he could to persuade us otherwise. Put it this way, there was quite a lively atmosphere that day. And what do you know? It sounded shite. Meanwhile, Ravi had brought the fader up too late on the twelve-inch version and missed off the first drumbeat. Being a democratic organisation, we took a vote on whether the mistake should stay and the ‘Yes’ vote prevailed, which is why the run-out grooves are ‘Outvoted’ and ‘Fac 73 1A’.
Incidentally, both ‘Blue Monday’ and the album were pressed at MVS (Record Pressing Ltd) in Islington. Even though Factory had a stake in MVS they were still in debt to them, and financing the pressing was a typically cap-in-hand affair.
But we did it. ‘Blue Monday’ came out, and at first the only plaudits we received were via stories told to us about other bands. Such as, Kraftwerk being so impressed with the song that they turned up at Britannia Row to record Tour De France because they wanted to achieve the same sound we’d got on ‘Blue Monday’, even going to the lengths of booking Mike Johnson as engineer. They took one look at the 60s décor and equipment, turned on their heels and left. They didn’t believe we could have recorded it there. They even accused Mike of lying.
The other story I heard was about the Eurythmics being in a cab on the way home from the studio, having just finished their new album. On hearing ‘Blue Monday’ on the radio, Dave Stewart ordered the taxi driver to pull over, then listened very carefully to the whole track. Putting his head in his hands, he ordered the taxi back back to the studio saying, ‘Oh God. We’re going to have to start it all again.’
Neil Tennant also tells a story in the The New Order Story about hearing ‘Blue Monday’ for the first time and it breaking his heart, it being the very track he wanted the Pet Shop Boys to make: ‘ “I’m Keeping My Fingers Crossed”, it was called,’ he said. Too late, Neil.
We loved the idea of not compromising, of being told that it was commercial suicide to release records like that. Tony and Rob were right behind us. When we were informed that it had no chance in the charts or radio play anywhere in the world we just laughed. But exactly the opposite happened: it reached number 12 in the UK charts on 19 March 1983 and descended quickly, but stayed in the top 100 for another seventeen weeks.
Otherwise, not too much of a splash. (Although in 1998 an American metal band called Orgy had such a huge hit with it that we were sent awards which said: Congratulations on writing ‘the most played song of the year on US radio’.)
It did well among our new fans, as we’d hoped, but staunch Joy Division fans were a bit mystified, calling it too much of a change in direction. There was some international chart action, but it wasn’t really what you’d call a big hit anywhere.
But we did get asked to play on Top of the Pops. Well, I say play, more mime in fact, and we did not mime so we said no. We will only play live.
They said no.
They asked again the next week, same reply both ways.
Then they asked a third time and said yes, you can play live. We were delighted. Regardless of what most musicians say, Top of the Pops in England was pretty much the Holy Grail. Everybody watched it, all the people that mattered, your mates and your family. We were hoping to be like the Sex Pistols Mk II and blow everyone away.
It didn’t work out like that.
For Top of the Pops you had to be there at eight o’clock in the morning to set up your gear, and then you had to break for lunch and do an afternoon soundcheck before the first rehearsal.
It was a long day and it was particularly hard for us because, firstly, they weren’t set up to do live sound, and secondly, the BBC crew, in true television fashion, were a right bunch of jobsworths. A group like us arrives, anti-miming, and you could see their faces drop, like, ‘Oh bloody hell, look what the cat’s dragged in,’ but we were at our ornery, cantankerous young worst and we felt miming was wrong, very wrong, and we weren’t about to surrender our principles to anyone, and that’s why we were playing live. (Surrendering our principles came later, when, after years of holding our noses in the air and saying, ‘Keep music live,’ we got offered to do a broadcast in San Remo, with a guaranteed audience of fifty million. ‘But you can only do it if you mime,’ they told us, and we went, ‘Oh well, shall we mime then? Does it matter, really?’ And we did. We got pissed up, had a right laugh, mimed, made a complete bollocks of it and nobody noticed and nobody cared. Least of all us.)
Either way, we were doing it live and, on the plus side, I looked good, because I was wearing a new shirt. A new shirt for me, that was. I’d found it in the dressing room beforehand, last week’s band must have left it – top. But on the minus side, as everyone who saw it then or has seen the YouTube clip since knows, it sounded bloody awful.
It’s no secret that our single went down ten places in the charts the week after our performance, which was practically unheard of. A slot on Top of the Pops usually guaranteed you a ten-place increase up the charts. But we were delighted about the drop because we’d achieved our objective – the objective being to be as awkward and truculent as possible, to everyone. So what if the record went down and we didn’t achieve anything apart from devilment? The important thing is to do what you do and believe in what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
The great thing about playing Top of the Pops – apart from the subsidised canteen – was that you got paid for it, and you even got what they called porterage for supposedly carrying in your own instruments. Plus they sent you a cheque to your home address. They sent it to you personally rather than to the group so Rob couldn’t get his hands on it.
We were still only on £ 100 a week. So that was mega.
What wasn’t mega was going back to my mum’s, full of myself, only to be greeted by her saying, ‘How could you?’ as she cuffed me round the head. ‘How could you show me up in front of the neighbours?’
I went, ‘What?’
She went, ‘You were chewing, chewing on bloody Top of the Pops. I’ve never been so ashamed. What will the neighbours say?’ And she wouldn’t talk to me for weeks.
Top of the Pops aside, ‘Blue Monday’ went on to be our biggest-selling single ever, still is. Even so, it was never that special to us and, to be honest, I thought ‘Thieves Like Us’ was a much better song.
Besides which, I’ve got mixed feelings about ‘Blue Monday’ now. When you have a hit like that you start getting the kind of royalties that make it less important to keep working. You can sit there doing nothing and the money keeps rolling in. The success of the back catalogue means there’s less pressure to come up with new wage-earners. There’s artistic pressure, but no financial pressure.
When we bumped into Errol Brown of Hot Chocolate in Advision Studios in 1987 someone asked him if he was doing new material. ‘My dear boy,’ he said, ‘why should I? I earn enough on the songs I’ve written.’
And eventually that made it particularly hard for me for two reasons: first, I like to work. I like to be kept busy. Second, I’m shit with money. The other two were careful – in Barney’s case, very careful. But not me. I throw it away like a man with eight arms. So in a way, ‘Blue Monday’ became another nail in the coffin.
The sleeve was magnificent. Peter Saville had come on a rare trip to the practice place in Cheetham Hill and had been intrigued by all our new equipment. As we very proudly showed him our new Emulator keyboard he was fascinated by the fact that the sounds were stored on these . . .
‘Floppy disks?’ he said. ‘It looks like a little miniature LP sleeve!’ he giggled. ‘How cute.’
Should have been no surprise to us when he later presented his interpretation of it as the sleeve for the twelve-inch, the idea being to ‘emulate’ the disk. We had made remarkable use of the Emulator on ‘Blue Monday’ so it seemed very fitting.
There were many production problems to be sorted out in using the floppy disk design for a sleeve, though, the first being the cut-outs. There were three. To copy this for the sleeve each one had to be done separately by hand through a machine press, once for each hole. With an initial pressing of 50,000 copies, this became a considerable outlay of time and money. Next, we didn’t want our name or any information about the song on the sleeve. The same way we acted in Joy Division, not even the song name.
Let the music speak for itself.
Peter was still very intrigued by this attitude and he came up with a great idea. He was fascinated by the data held on this little blank disk with no information on the surface but everything coded onto the disk. He liked the idea of coding the information onto his version of the disk, the record sleeve, using the tools of his trade, colours and ink. He came up with his infamous coloured alphabet, each colour representing a letter. This became a design puzzle for the fans. You could decipher the colours using the pinwheel code on the sleeve itself. All the information was there to read, once you worked it out. His own musical Enigma code.
The initial pressing soon sold out and a delighted Tony told us he’d ordered 100,000 more. We weren’t that bothered . . . we had the rest of the United Kingdom to terrorise: Scotland and Ireland and Wales soon fell under our spell. Then it was back to America.
