‘My knee was in the video’

In Japan again, at the beginning of 1987, and we were introduced to two new wonderful things: kimonos and Kobe beef.

See? Our palates, along with our waistlines, were expanding, both physically and metaphysically. No doubt we were attracted by the fact that in order to make Kobe beef, the cows were massaged daily with beer – supposedly to make the meat very tender. We liked the idea of that and were happy to be plied with the stuff.

Trouble was, in Japan you got such small portions. So we’d be banging on the tables, ‘Bring us more beef, Pedro, bring us more beef!’

Everybody else in the restaurant, these quiet, retiring Japanese types – and I’m telling you, I’ve never seen so much bowing in all my life as I did on that tour – would be staring at us, open-mouthed, like we were arrivals from another planet, and because they stared at us, we played up to it and our manners got even more coarse and rough.

I remember this particular night when we’d finished our Viking feast of Kobe beef and had been hitting the saki hard. Rob in particular was absolutely bladdered. Now our promoter again on this tour was a venerable older gentleman (let’s call him Taka), who came across like someone out of an old Japanese gangster movie and Rob was fascinated by his hair, which was always creamed down smooth, with a mirror-like finish, like mine at the time. Suddenly Rob stood up, grabbed the poor bloke in a headlock, went, ‘Ah, you’re all right, you,’ and knuckled his head hard.

When Rob at last let him go Taka was very flushed and his hair was sticking out in all directions. We laughed but we soon realised that all the other Japanese were looking at Rob like he’d just stuck a knife in the bloke. It turned out that in Japan, men never touch each other, it is frowned upon; apart from a handshake it’s completely forbidden. So it was that shocking to them – seeing their boss treated like that, his hair sticking up all over the show – they literally nearly fainted.

What with stuff like that and our hosts’ inability to say the word ‘no’, we actually found it a little bit difficult to work in Japan, and it was a bit of a relief to move on to Australia again, where support for New Order had always been very solid, and our promoters Vivien Lees and Ken West would soon be going on to much bigger things (i.e. promo-toing the Big Day Out festival).

Our lives were entering a sort of treadmill stage, repeating in a wonderful pattern. We would go to Japan/Australia one year, the next year would be America and Europe, bit of a break to record or write an album, then back on the treadmill again. Working like this and being looked after so wonderfully made the years fly by.

Our 1987 tour of Spain was slightly different. It was organised by Andy Fisher (ex-Stockholm Monsters manager) in his new guise as an agent. It also featured, for the first time, my new bass roadie Jane Roberts. Dave Pils had shocked us all by handing in his notice and leaving after eight years. Dave was a great guy and a very good friend. He was vegetarian and when Rob asked him why, he said in his Bow Bells cockney accent, ‘You just cannot get a good cut of meat these days.’ Dave I would sorely miss too.

Jane and I had been introduced at the Haçienda. Standing five-foot-ten in Doc Marten boots, she was attractive in a grungy kind of way and very confident. She marched up to me, poked me in the chest and said, ‘I should be your roadie,’ then walked off. I was intrigued. I talked it over with Andy Robinson and we decided to go for it.

We arrived in Spain and the first thing we realised was that the promoter was an arsehole. He was a round, squat little guy who just didn’t seem to know what was going on. Rob was still struggling to regain his lost leadership role and together they made quite a pair. The first day we were there he took us to a funfair and insisted Rob join him on this big-wheel thing where they promptly got stuck in their seats right at the top. Rob was terrified of heights, and always had been. He started screaming and then this Spanish guy joined in.

‘Quite a sight,’ said Denny Laine, who was standing next to me.

I had to agree. Turned out that Denny Laine (ex-Moody Blues/Wings) was Pedro’s best mate and had joined us on the tour. A nice bloke as it goes, and he kept saying to me, ‘We are destined to work together.’

We weren’t, as it happened.

The first gig was in a bull ring and our dressing room was right next to the bull’s dressing room. Which, surprisingly, Barney found quite funny.

Terry had developed an obsession with Dead or Alive from Liverpool, and played ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’ on his Walkman, constantly. Even when you tried to talk to him he wouldn’t turn it off, mouthing the lyrics in your face. Some kind of surreal protest, I thought, like Dave’s departure had unsettled him.

I also discovered something else going wrong: me and Jane were flirting like crazy and it was getting worse and worse. After the gig, back at the hotel, one of Pedro’s oppos had turned up on a Yamaha V-Max, a beautiful, very high-powered motorcycle. Jane admired it. ‘Take it for a spin, senor,’ the guy said, as he tossed me the keys. Jane was grinning from ear to ear and I couldn’t back down, sensing a way to impress her. So I got on and raced off, slipping and sliding my way through the Madrid traffic, with no helmet on.

This thing was a monster and it was one of the most terrifying rides of my life, fighting my way through the traffic in the busy centre, I thought I was going to die. Every time I changed gear, the back tyre locked up, squealing, and I had to kick the behemoth back up again. Having got lost, when I eventually arrived back at the hotel they’d retired to the bar. I parked and fell on the floor, shaking. When I had sufficiently recovered I went in, tossed him the keys back and said, ‘Thanks, off to bed. I’m tired.’

This girl is trouble, I thought, as I lay in bed, still shaking.

The next gig, at Mollerussa Pabellon, was probably the worst we ever did. It was terrifying for a number of reasons. First of all, no one had any idea where the place was or why we were playing there. It was a tiny town with a population of only 15,000. It didn’t make sense.

We arrived to find the venue was a big metal-roofed cowshed, and the acoustics were awful. The dressing room had been built out of plywood in a corner of the room by one side of the stage. But it had no roof.

‘No time to build roof,’ we were informed by Pedro. We were also informed there was no security.

‘They no turn up,’ he said, but assured us everything was ‘bueno’ because he had drafted in two of the local Catalan rugby teams to do security.

Now these men were seriously huge and there was a lot of them. I think they were all up for a paid night out and had turned up in their droves. Unfortunately they were also bitter rivals and spent the soundcheck charging each other in scrum-type formations across the shed. To say we were worried would be the biggest understatement of our entire career. On returning for the gig it had quietened down and the audience had at least separated the warring teams, for a while. We went on . . . it started to go wrong immediately. The audience began to divide into factions, too, and we were being drowned out by the chants of both sides. Shit. Barney just did what he normally did in situations like this, closed his eyes and sang. One of the rugby players working behind the barrier at the front, who had already been laughing at my ripped jeans, threw a full glass of beer over Barney.

I thought, Right, I’ve had enough, and went to put my guitar down to go and nut this bastard. Jane grabbed me. ‘Stop. Look, there’s too many of them.’

I looked. There was. At least ten of the big bastards at each end of the barrier. This little one was obviously on the wing. I bit my tongue and smiled at Jane.

Shit! I was really starting to like her . . . a lot.

We finished and sought refuge in the tiny dressing room, where we swore there would be no encore. But then, as if on cue, it started raining bottles and glasses. The bastards had spotted the dressing room had no roof and found our weakness. We bolted out, with Rob screaming, ‘Do a fooking encore! Now!’

I said, ‘Make sure you get the money, Rob.’

‘I will after this debacle!’ he shot back.

We encored, tore the gear down and loaded out while it seemed like half the crowd were still kicking the shit out of the other half.

I had never been so glad to escape to a bus in my life. Once there, Jane sat next to me. We both laughed with relief as the lights went off and we drove away, and then she leaned forward and kissed me full on the lips. Double shit.

I did not know what to do. This was different from all the one-night stands. We parted and studiously ignored each other for the rest of the evening.

In the morning, as we left for the airport, Rob was really hungover. ‘Did you get the money, Rob?’ asked Andy Fisher.

‘Yes. Ten grand in potatoes,’ and pulled a massive wad out of his pocket, waving it around. At the airport Pedro turned up and took Rob to one side, pulling him over to some seats away from where we were checking in. We could see Pedro gesticulating fiercely, spouting off passionately then getting down on one knee. Weird. Was he going to propose? Then we all watched as Rob reached into his pocket and pulled out the wad of potatoes and handed them back to Pedro. Rob shrugged. Me and Barney screamed, ‘NO!’ and legged it across to where they were, but Pedro had a speed that belied his shape and was gone in an instant, running outside and jumping into a car that I’m sure was driven by that bastard Laine. We stormed back to see Rob.

‘What happened?’ we demanded.

‘I felt sorry for him. He was going to lose his house.’

‘What about our fucking houses!’ we chorused.

It was a quiet flight back.

We returned to a freezing-cold UK to prepare for the release of what would go on to become our biggest-selling album, helping us to finally crack America: Substance.

It started with a little acorn. Tony Wilson came to tell me he was thinking of getting a new car: He didn’t need my permission, but he always asked my advice on which car to buy and I’d picked his previous one, a Mercedes I90E 2.3-16 valve, a beautiful car but very small inside, and Tony had had a child in the meantime so he wanted something bigger.

I suggested he got a Jaguar XJ6 Coupé, which he duly did, then had it modified to look like Steed’s Jaguar out of The Avengers. It was a beautiful, beautiful car – the best car Tony ever had; plus, it came with a CD player, and in those days, to have a CD player in your car made you Mr Fancypants right from the word go.

So now he had this amazing car complete with CD player, and what Tony wanted to do was play the New Order singles in his car, only our singles had never been released on a CD. We still had a policy of not putting the singles on the album, and it was way before the days of CD singles. Ours had only ever come out on vinyl. So what Tony suggested to Rob was that we do a CD compilation of singles, so he could play them in his car. Not only that, but Tony had an idea how to clear our debts too. Every idea Tony ever had was a way of clearing our debts. Each album we made would clear our debts. Every club night we tried would clear our debts. Each gig we did at the Haçienda would clear our debts, he said.

At this point in time the situation was getting pretty dire. This was before the days of Madchester and the Happy Mondays’ and the Haçienda’s heyday. Factory depended on New Order to keep it afloat – so it could keep on putting out records by the likes of Shark Vegas and Kalima. The trouble was that New Order was having a problem getting the money from our records’ successes out of Factory and the bill was getting bigger and bigger. As a Factory director, Rob was compromised. Tony was spending money like there was no tomorrow. On cars, see above, and business-class flights. Around that time he was given some kind of award for being the most-travelled record company executive in the world. They totted up that one year he spent something like £300,000 on travel alone. He liked nothing more than flying to New York in business, to talk business to somebody about some fanciful deal they may do with Factory – deals that never, ever came off. He certainly was a social animal. I remember Rob sitting there once, at a meeting, with Tony telling us about it and saying, ‘And you know what he’s fucking achieved in all that time? Ask him, ask him . . . Fuck all.’

So what Tony did was suggest to Rob that we release Substance at a more favourable rate of 25/75 in Factory’s favour, the idea being that it would recoup more quickly and Factory could pay New Order the money they owed from the other records. Tony always had a bee in his bonnet about our deal with Factory, telling Rob time and time again that it wasn’t 50/50; that because Factory paid the mechanical royalties to the BPI it was 59/41. Rob wouldn’t entertain it.

The term ‘mechanical’ has its origins in the ‘piano rolls’ on which music was recorded in the early twentieth century. The concept is now primarily oriented to the sale of records or compact discs, but has grown to include internet downloads. The scope is wide and covers any copyrighted audio composition that is rendered mechanically (stamped, pressed or copied); that is, without human performers. Basically, every time a song is manufactured (in whatever format) to be sold or downloaded, the writer is owed a ‘mechanical royalty’. That royalty is roughly equal to 9.1 per cent, regardless of whether the manufactured items are sold or not. The internet download rate is usually lower. The record company is generally the payer.

So I suppose it was karma that Substance would then turn out to be our biggest-selling album ever; we gave away our biggest-selling record to the record company at a reduced cost – for no reason other than they couldn’t pay us for the other ones at the full rate because of bad management.

I remember bumping into the guy who played ‘Gordon the Moron’ when Jilted John appeared on Top of the Pops once and him saying to me, ‘Why do people say Factory were a great record company? They couldn’t even pay their artists. I would think that’s a prerequisite for any great record company.’

That, right there, ladies and gentlemen, was an example of Factory logic. In other words, no fucking logic at all.

In the meantime, it was decided we would re-record two of our singles for the compilation: ‘Confusion’ and ‘Temptation’.

Not a great session. My nemesis John Robie had given Barney this idea about singing in his key and, having listened to ‘Confusion’ with his new cultured ear, Barney decided he wanted to have another go at it. Personally I liked the song the way it was and thought the re-recording in a different key made it sound sad – not sad as in bad, but a melancholy key (have a listen) – an argument that would end up raging from that day to the day we split in 2006.

‘It’s just the same,’ he’d snap, ‘only different.’ Thanks for the technical description, Barn. ‘Temptation’ was the same idea and we used the opportunity to bring it in line with how we played it ‘live’, but again, to my mind it didn’t sound better than the original. The use of the Yamaha synths and huge snare sound made it sound too hard to me.

Either way, we re-recorded at Yellow Two; and, as I said, it was a pretty un-j oyous experience.

To finish off Substance we were sent to Advision Studios in London to record what would become ‘True Faith’ with Stephen Hague. Tom Atencio had been pressing for us to write a straightforward pop hit – something purposely commercial and transatlantic – and he thought that if anyone could deliver his beloved ‘breakthrough single’ it would be Stephen Hague, who at the time had a great reputation as a pop producer.

By the time he commenced a long association with New Order in 1987, producer Stephen Hague already had a reputation for crafting lush, intelligent pop music, having produced OMD’s 1985 album, Crush, and then gone on to breakthrough work on the Pet Shop Boys’ debut album, Please, producing the hits ‘West End Girls’, ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)’ and ‘Suburbia’. After producing ‘True Faith’ for New Order, Hague continued to work with the band as well as the Pet Shop Boys and Erasure, producing their massive-selling The Innocents album, plus production work for Electronic, the Communards, Pere Ubu, Holly Johnson and Public Image Ltd.

What we didn’t realise was that Stephen specialised in co-writing with the artists, which wasn’t something we wanted. Not only that, but the session came with a serious deadline – our first. Factory had gone all-out to coordinate a simultaneous release of Substance throughout all the licensees in Europe and America. Very ambitious. We had ten days to write and mix the two tracks, and no longer. The pressure was on.

During the first few days of the session, Hague and Barney worked on the chord sequencing. We’d turned up without much in the way of ideas, a bass/snare pattern and a half-written low bass riff Barney had nicked from a song he’d heard on Kiss FM in New York, and a two-chord change suggesting possibly a verse/chorus transition.

After a few days we began to get a bit bogged down, but my suggestion that we jam ourselves out of it was met with a lack of interest, even from Hague. He had a very rich sound, much richer than what was then the ‘traditional’ New Order sound. I had a feeling that when I came to work on it there would be so many riffs on the record that there wouldn’t be any room for me to add anything. Hague was oblivious, and even suggested that Barney work on the vocal melody before the tracks were fully formed. I understood that from his point of view as a pop producer – the old adage that it’s all about the vocals – but this was not how New Order worked. Barney was a very reluctant lead singer, still giving the impression that he didn’t want to sing at all. Early in the session Hague was recording tracks of vocal ideas and lyrics, recording track after track, which he would happily work on for hours collating into a ‘master’ ideas track.

Barney would be doing a fair bit of drinking to lubricate himself while doing these vocals, which would wipe him out for the next day on a couple of occasions. After one particular night of singing he decided to stay in bed the next day and ‘work on the vocals’ while the rest of us returned to the studio to watch Hague program the drums on his Emu SPI2 drum machine.

Steve Morris was the next band member to suffer from the not-so-warm shoulder. Steve didn’t get to play on either track apart from some live hi-hat and cymbals at the end of the session.

As luck would have it, that day we had also managed to lock Barney in the flat, deadlocking the front door so escape was impossible. All he had for company was some mouldy cheese and daytime TV.

Amazingly, when we returned that evening he had managed, probably out of sheer boredom, to nearly finish the lyrical ideas for both tracks. We showed solidarity by staying up all night suggesting changes and finishing off the lyrics. It was nice to be included at last. Although Barney was pretty pissed off, you couldn’t help thinking some kind of proper imprisonment was the way forward for the next LP.

There was a small taste issue with regard to the drug reference in the second verse – small boys growing up and doing drugs – with Hague worrying about the radio reception of what would surely be our next single.

Rob was very defensive of it, suggesting it reflected the culture of the time. Rob was right but we were being very, very naive, which now is frankly embarrassing. We went with the headmaster’s recommendation, changing it back as soon as he left the room for ‘live’. This was one of just a handful of what you might call ‘cultural differences’ between the ex-punks from Manchester and the pop producer from Portland. Even so, Rob and I worried it might lead to accusations of a sell-out. Were we selling our soul to the devil with Stephen Hague as the salesman?

That aside, the session progressed well from a work point of view, with the vocals on the tracks improving them immensely and the next few days spent augmenting them with more keyboard overdubs.

I could hear time running out for me. Stephen had earmarked the last three days to mix. So finally, on the evening of the day before mixing, it was time for yours truly to step up. One of the things I’d always liked about Hague’s way of working was his early finishes, rarely working past nine most evenings. Tonight it looked ominous.

We started with ‘1963’, its title now taken from Barney’s lyrics, and as I suspected there was nothing for me to play on the track. The only sound was people leaving the room as I picked up my guitar. I was really struggling, getting nowhere, and I could see what ‘the others’ would be thinking again: Why can’t we have one without him on it?

So there were no cheerleaders, no one saying, ‘Go on, Hooky, go for it, Hooky.’ My neurosis and paranoia were the only things keeping me company tonight. Don’t worry, I’m not after sympathy, I’m just telling you what happened.

Hague tried to help in his own way, getting me to double the sequence bass, play the low notes of the chords on the bridge and chorus, but it wasn’t very satisfying. It certainly wasn’t me. I tried ‘True Faith’ and couldn’t get much on it either. There were a few OK-sounding bits, and I tried, I really did, maybe too hard, but I felt I was getting nowhere and then, on the dot of nine o’clock, just as I was thinking, Fuck it, if that’s what they want, Hague piped up with, ‘That should do it! I think that’ll be enough.’

I gave up. I left the control room and moped around, thinking that them lot had beaten me; that I was surplus to requirements at last. Hague just carried on ‘finishing off’, as he termed it, and we called it a day.

Then Tom Atencio appeared.

‘Hey, Hooky,’ he said to me, ‘what the fuck are you doing, man?’

‘What do you mean?’ I bleated.

‘Where’s the fucking bass? I don’t hear you on this fucking track?’

‘I can’t get anything, Tom. I just can’t get anything. I can’t get any bass on the tracks. I can’t play on these songs,’ I wailed.

Tom had this habit of calling me ‘you fucking fucker’ when he got angry.

‘Come on, Hooky, you fucking fucker. You’ve got to be on the tracks. Now get back in there and fucking, fuckering do it.’

‘No, Tom, you don’t understand. They don’t want me on the track. The producer hates my guts. Them lot don’t care. They’ve written me out, mate.’

‘Right, you fucking fucker, wait there, I’ll be back.’

Tom stormed into the control room, and of course I wasn’t there, but I hope it went along the lines of: ‘You bunch of fucking fuckers, you’ve got to put Hooky on this track, man, come on. He’s got to be on this record. Hooky is the sound of New Order.’ Going absolutely mad. That was what I was hoping.

As far as Hague was concerned, he’d finished the track. He didn’t give a shit that one of the band members wasn’t on it. The other three – they didn’t give a shit either, and that’s what really hurt at the time and still does.

I wondered then and wonder now if I was reaping what I’d sown – for being too loud and obstreperous, for not being ‘electronic’ enough? Or if I just deserved it. I don’t know. It didn’t seem to bother Steve Morris.

But anyway, Tom came back out, told me to stop being such a fucking soft fucker, and pushed me back in the control room to do my bass again.

Really nervous now, I returned. It was uncomfortable but I started playing again and at last it began to come – on ‘True Faith’ I got the intro part, then the ascending bits, then the bridge, the break bit, the end bit. ‘1963’ followed, not as strong as the other song but a great outro and loads of bits in between.

In the end, I was really proud of the bass on both, and I thought the tracks stood up as proof that I was indeed intrinsic to the New Order sound, just as Tom had said I was – the only person in our immediate circle ever to admit it.

Listen to Stephen Hague’s pop mix and the bass is so low you can barely hear it, and now even he admits that was a mistake. To my mind, Barney loved that mix and that was what he was aiming for from that moment on. Low bass or no bass at all.

I think the B-side, ‘1963’, holds the record (no pun intended) for the longest time before you actually hear any bass on a New Order track. Five minutes odd, sadly.

I got a little ‘revenge’ when Arthur Baker did a remix of ‘1963’ and included all the bass melodies Hague had rejected.

‘True Faith’ ended up being a big song for us, no doubt about it. The title I got from a book I was reading at the time, James A. Michener’s Texas, which talked about Catholicism being the only ‘True Faith’. Rob liked that. Here’s a little-known fact: Barney and I were the only two Protestants at Factory; nearly all the rest were Catholics. Read into that what you will.

I didn’t think ‘True Faith’ was that much better than anything we’d done in the past, but it certainly eclipsed our previous work in terms of sales and international exposure on Substance. I have to say ‘1963’ was a beautiful song, even if I’m hardly on it. Well done, Barney. To further compound any ill-feeling I held towards the record, they cut me out of the video as well. Well, my knee was in the video. Should have been my arse, really.

Geek Alert

Recording ‘True Faith’

Advision Studio One was state-of-the-art and had a first-generation SSL mixing board and Urei Time Align studio monitors. In terms of digital processing units, Advision sometimes obtained and used prototypes of units before they were even marketed. The studio had previously been used by Stephen Hague to mix Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Madam Butterfly’. The house engineer was David Jacob, who had worked with him on the McLaren mix.

SSL mixing consoles: 4000 series desk

Founded in 1969, SSL was a digital audio pioneer company that designed high-quality mixing desks with high-bandwidth performance as standard.

Most consoles came with a ‘Total Recall Facility’, enabling settings (and mixes) to be recalled with a high degree of accuracy. This was felt to be important to most producers and record companies, enabling ‘mistakes’ to be easily and quickly remedied. However, in practice this rarely happened as a lot of the outboard equipment, reverbs and effects had to be re-set by hand.

The development of converter technology for the transforming of analogue signals into digital signals had created a variety of supporting technical developments. DSP or Digital Signal Processing technology had led to the advent of digital mixing desks. This technology had created both a cheaper and lower-maintenance alternative to the old analogue mixing desk. SSL digital audio consoles would now become the first choice for most studios around the world.

Personally I was never convinced, and thought that the SSL desks had a bright, tinny sound, but there was no doubting their usefulness. The recording medium was to be two Sony 3324, 24-irack digital recording machines linked together. The Sony 3324 was a ‘Dash’ recorder with a 16-bit resolution and a 44.1kHz or 48kHz sampling rate, and required the use of half-inch metal-particle formulation magnetic tape. All ‘Dash’ recorders primarily use the SDIF-2 (Sony Digital Interface Format -2) and were completely compatible with SSL mixing desks. These early machines would soon get a reputation for being brittle at the top treble frequencies and there was much resistance to the recording of ‘rock’ music on them, but it wasn’t apparent on this session. Hague reckoned this was the perfect set-up for our music. The connecting software enabled the machines to lock and run together in perfect sync, or the machines could be offset against each other to a predetermined value. Based on the tempo of the track you worked out a SMPTE-to-bars formula for how much one machine could be offset. The computer would read the number of bars in SMPTE code and enter it into the remote of the slave machine. The machine could then rewind or wind to the point stipulated, e.g. eight bars ahead or behind the master machine. You were also able to make digital copies of the master reel on the slave machine, and then offset it by a set amount of bars forward or backward, enabling you to move sections of music around, doing major structural edits to the songs. There was also a rehearse-mode facility on the master machine that you could practise/listen to, previewing the results without actually going into record on the slave machine. You could then elongate or copy any of the recorded elements by bouncing the parts between machines. You were still susceptible to crinkling and shedding of the tape and bad edits, things you would normally associate with analogue machines, but it was much easier to make safety copies, with these usually being produced at the end of each day’s session. Because of the high specification of the conversion cards, several transfers could be done between the two machines with no deterioration of signal. Even working digitally there could be a difference after a few bounces, mainly depending on the source material. You would have to listen carefully for deterioration of live kit sounds and possibly certain elements in the low end. Even now you could not just bounce back and forth endlessly. Syncing up the tape machines with the ‘live’ equipment was still in its infancy. A spec for MIDI Time Code would not actually appear until late 1987, so there was no MIDI clock/MIDI Time Code at this time. There was an external box that was attached to the serial port of the computer that could read and generate SMPTE, setting the tempo on it and recording the SMPTE to one track of the tape machine then routing the same track back to the reader.

Our Yamaha QX1 sequencer was used along with a Yamaha DX5 for bass sounds (basically two Yamaha DX7s in one) along with the Octave Voyetra 8, polyphonic synths, and an Akai S900 sampler. It was very early days for this machine and there were not many library sounds for it yet. Many would be amassed throughout the session. We also used an Emu Emulator II sampler, using five-inch floppy disks, which came with a large library of sounds.

Two CV-to-MIDI converters were used – the idea being that you could link the Midi and non-Midi keyboards together and play them at the same time (you can hear this technique in a lot of 80s records, some using very complex sounds – this was long before layered pre-sets and Roland’s LA Synthesis was developed). There was always a certain amount of excitement generated by connecting all the boxes together just to see what would happen, à la ‘Temptation’. The pad sound on ‘True Faith’ and all the chord changes were a combination of an Emu II sample and the live Voyetras.

MIDI was used extensively to connect the set-ups together. A Macintosh SE30 computer – running Performer (written especially for the Macintosh) – ran the sequencer patterns, which were copied from our QX1. A pattern-based, non-MIDI Emu systems SP12 drum machine was also used to program the drums. The computer was clocking the SP12, and drum tracks on both songs were written in real time. Neither ‘True Faith’ nor ‘1963’ would feature real drums. Live hi-hat and cymbals would be integrated later into both songs, with the use of close-microphones for the hi-hats and stereo overhead microphones for the cymbals.

Work on ‘True Faith’ and ‘1963’ was taking place simultaneously, with the band and producer sometimes bouncing back and forth between the two tracks on an hourly basis.

Schedule

Day 1: Set-up.

Day 2: Recording both sequenced backing tracks.

Day 3: Overdubbing keyboards and drums with song structure of ‘1963’.

Day 4: Overdubbing keyboards and drums with song structure of ‘True Faith’ plus vocal try-outs both tracks.

Day 5: Overdubbing keyboards and drums both tracks.

Day 6: Vocals both tracks.

Day 7: Vocals, backing vocals plus guitars and bass both tracks.

Day 8: Set up mix.

Day 9: Mix ‘True Faith’.

Day10: Mix ‘1963’.

Vocals were sung in the control room into a hand-held Beyer M88 microphone, the idea being to make face-to-face communication the most important thing. We had been doing this with Barney for some considerable time. It was difficult but made for no isolation, in a working context that always comes from having a singer ‘isolated’ in a vocal booth. Martin Hannett had shown us the problems with that. There was no discernible loss in quality by not recording the vocals in isolation, and it made for a much better work environment; problems with sibilance or popping were dealt with as they appeared.

Later that year we returned to Glastonbury for the second of what would eventually be our three headline visits. It turned out to be something of a transitional year for the festival and we couldn’t get over the difference between the two-hippies-in-a-field of 1981, when we played with Hawkwind, and the muddy roadblock of six years later. There were so many people there and so much traffic around the site that we literally couldn’t get in. We were staying in a hotel nearby but when it came to arriving onto the site to play we just couldn’t get through, so Rob bribed a guy offering helicopter rides to take us in. Christ, this thing was like a flying motorcycle. I was shitting myself. It felt like it was going to drop out of the sky at any second; it was the first and only time that Gillian ever touched me, gripping my hand like a vice, convinced we were going to die. But it did beat the three-and-a-half-hour traffic jam to get on the site. Luckily we were able to drive out.

The first time we played Glastonbury we had used the Eavis farmhouse as a dressing room, and I remember getting there early and Michael teaching me how to make toast in an Aga cooker (the first time I’d ever seen one) while Emily played with her dolls at our feet. (Michael’s cooking tip: you put the bread on a metal plate then put it on the highest rack right at the top of the Aga. It makes beautiful toast, but make sure you keep an eye on it as it also makes beautiful charcoal.) I distinctly recall sitting there, eating delicious home-made marmalade on toast, as delightful and rustic a scene as you can possibly imagine – then to be confronted with the mayhem outside.

Like everything else, the dressing room had changed since the last time we were there. The farmhouse was no longer being used; it was all a bit more rock’n’roll and we were in a big static caravan. I remember seeing Michael later walking around carrying black bin liners full of money. The event had exploded. It had in the space of a couple of years gone from being a small (well, smallish) cottage industry to a vast, gargantuan exercise. With the popularity and money had come an almost complete breakdown in security. There were people clambering over walls and pulling the fences down. But even so it still made an absolute fortune.

I think it was the last one they did for CND. I remember feeling very guilty because by rights we should have done it for free – correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that for years bands played Glastonbury for expenses only and all the profits went to CND – but Rob had insisted we got paid. Quite a lot too, £10,000 if memory serves. Sorry, Michael. Ironically, we must have blown that tenfold by bringing in Philippe Decouflé to film us playing ‘True Faith’ live on stage. The American record company had been protesting about the lack of the band in the videos, which usually resulted in them getting dropped from MTV every single time. Everyone loved Philippe’s video for ‘True Faith’ and the only concession Warner Bros demanded was refusing to pay for their share of the video costs unless the group were included. Filming at Glastonbury was deemed the solution. Typically, in the video there was my leg for a second, if that? I protested but ‘the others’ obviously loved it and voted for that edit. I was really starting to feel victimised.

It was a great gig though. Out of our touring career, my three highlights are the three times we played Glastonbury. I love it there and it can come in quite handy. I remember having a race in my car with some bloke in the tunnels under Manchester airport (the ones where all the footballers crash) and he beat me hands down. As we pulled up at the lights at the end I wound the window down and shouted, ‘You might have beat me but I’ve headlined Glastonbury three times! Beat that? Ha!’

That showed him.

In June we played a jazz festival in Denmark (the precursor to the Aarhus Jazz Festival which would start in 1989), another Alan Wise gig, but he didn’t tell us until we got there that it was a jazz festival. God knows what possessed him, the money probably. A very peculiar place for us to play; I know we’d had some pretty wild performances but . . . ironically, this would prove to be our wildest. It was a lovely day and a lovely hotel. It just went downhill when we got to the gig and realised everyone and every band, apart from a comedy German group and us, were jazz aficionados. One look at the age of the hepcats in the audience and we knew it wasn’t going to go well.

But every cloud has a silver lining and ours, on this particular day, was Elephant beer by Carlsberg, 7.2 per cent. It was very strong but surprisingly drinkable. So we settled down watching Miles Davis’s antics. This guy really was a cool cat and everywhere he went at the festival he was escorted by about twenty security men, which was funny because the audience were a real bunch of geriatrics. The stage was entered from the back by a raised wooden walkway, about 3ft high and 100ft long. As we were preparing to go on it was just getting dark and Terry mustered the troops by the entrance of the walkway while the comedy German group did a ‘Madness’-type walk back from the stage. As they got off we got on and we set off, everything seemed normal. But when we got to the stage, Steve went, ‘Where’s Gillian?’ Looking round, there was no sign of her. She had been her usual quiet self all day, so nothing unusual there.

One of the roadies tore down the walkway to see if she’d gone for a piss but came back with no sighting. Now, this was worrying, where had she gone? I can’t remember who it was, but a shout of ‘Here she is!’ brought us halfway along the walkway to where she had fallen off and lay flat out on the grass. Everyone was very worried but as we pulled her up we noticed her eyes rolling, and that she was pissed . . . as a fart! The bloody Elephant beers had struck. We dusted her off and got her to the stage where she slurred, ‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’ And then went on to play the keyboards with what Barney once again described as ‘A BLOODY ORANGE!’

The noise was terrible. Steve grinned and bore it, but at one point it got much too much for me and I had to go and hide behind my bass cabs, it was so embarrassing. Everything was way, way out of tune (which fortunately may have worked in this jazz setting). The roadies all had their hands over their ears, and believe you me they’d heard a few dodgy ’uns in their time. At one point I even pushed Barney out as he tried to join me behind the cabs, with him shouting, ‘No, no, let me in.’

I’d like to say the set flew by, but I can’t, it was excruciating, and at the end me and Barney stormed off, leaving Steve to escort the inebriated Gillian.

We didn’t watch Miles Davis, preferring to go and drown our sorrows in the hotel bar with our new friend ‘The Elephant’. The next morning as I lay in bed with a throbbing head I could hear shouting outside. I looked out of the window and there was Alan in his underpants, gesticulating to two blonde girls who were riding horses in the surf on the beach; both girls by this time had very wet T-shirts on and he was shouting, ‘Come up here. Come up here. Fifty Kronkers the pair of you!’ I laughed, typical Alan, then as I turned round I realised someone was in my bed.

Jane.

The bloody Elephant beer had struck again.

Damn you, Carlsberg.

Also around this time we were approached by Michael Shamberg to write songs for the director Beth B, who was making a film called Salvation! We had a few riffs knocking around so we jammed a bit and came up with ‘Skullcrusher’, ‘Sputnik’, ‘Let’s Go’ and a couple of others, including ‘Touched by the Hand of God’.

‘Touched’ came from a bass riff I’d done on the sequencer, which pleased Barney no end, because using sequencers wasn’t something I made a habit of, and it was the only proper song we got out of the session. The rest of the songs were more like little snippets, or ‘stings’ as I now know to call them, thanks to the Mrs Merton Show.

Everybody loved ‘Touched’, and Tony and Rob both wanted to do it as a single, so for its release we got Arthur Baker to remix it, and before leaving for our tour of America we recorded another video.

Recommended again by Michael Shamberg, the director was Kathryn Bigelow, who’s since won an Oscar for The Hurt Locker, and of whom I remember two things very distinctly: first that she had a daughter the same age as my own daughter Heather, who sat with us in a restaurant eating tzatziki and taramasalata. I remember being amazed at how cosmopolitan this kid was, comparing her to my own, who lived on a diet of fish fingers, baked beans and the like. The second thing was that it looked to me as though Pete Saville had fallen for Kathryn, big-time. It looked like he fancied the pants off her.

In the restaurant Rob said, ‘Are we gonna get some wine or what?’ and Pete asked for the wine list, which I think was the first time I’d seen anybody do that. For me, back then, drinking was about drinking to get pissed, not the flavour, the bouquet or whatever other delights the wine list held. But Pete made this big song and dance about ordering the wine, like, ‘Do you want a Zinfandel or should we go for a Chardonnay? A Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Noir. Oh yes, it’s a good year for Pinot Noir . . .’ All that lot.

The wine arrived, the waiter poured it out, just a little bit, and Pete swilled it around his glass, sniffed it then had a taste, all the time behaving like he was the most sophisticated man on the planet. Doing all but drumming our fingers on the table, we waited, wishing he’d get the whole charade over with, all gasping for a drink. But Pete wasn’t happy. He asked the waiter for the cork, which he sniffed and then, pulling a face, said, ‘Oh no, it’s corked. I’m going to have to send it back.’

We were all going, ‘Send it back? What? We’re gagging for a drink here.’ But with a look at Kathryn as though to apologise for his uncultured companions, Pete insisted on sending it back, and we had to go through the same rigmarole again.

He returned two more bottles before he finally got one fit for Kathryn Bigelow to drink. I don’t think it worked, as far as I know, although it did cross my mind that I must try that sometime; it seemed like a very Terry-Thomas thing to do. I liked it.

I think it was Barney who came up with the idea to do a spoof heavy-metal video, to parody all the glam-metal groups of the period, Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard etc. So we hired Brixton Academy and we even hired a heavy-metal dresser because, yes, there are such things as people who ‘dress’ heavy-metal videos, and then we gave the footage to Kathryn. Back then she was much less well known, having only directed a vampire film called Near Dark and a movie called The Loveless. They’re both highly regarded cult film nows, but neither were massive hits so you could say we got Kathryn at an advantageous rate, Michael Shamberg recognising her potential.

She ended up using one of the Near Dark stars, Bill Paxton, in the ‘Touched by the Hand of God’ video, which she filmed around Battersea, stopping traffic for him to run across Battersea Bridge. The idea was to have the ‘love scene’ movie bits intercut with the ‘concert’ bits, so that it looked like one of those typical 1980s movie tie-in music videos, also parodying the typical glam-rock music videos of the era, over the top and over-budgeted. And if you think about that – how we originally recorded the song for a movie, but then paid a Hollywood director to make a spoof movie for the song’s video, well that might make your head hurt a bit.

The other thing about this video was that ‘we’ wanted to feature the group in it this time, even if we were obviously miming, wearing wigs and lots of daft leather costumes (we must have been mad). Prior to that, as I said, MTV had always resisted playing our videos because we never featured and it was one of their things at the time: band must be in video. Tom Atencio, in particular, was always on at us to appear in the videos, and I’ve told you the story of the ‘Regret’ video, as well as what happened here, which was that despite New Order’s starring appearance in the video, Kathryn Bigelow’s movie-style footage was considered too gruesome for MTV, the car crash particularly, and actually was also banned by English daytime/Saturday morning television, which was very important for a group’s videos at the time, so it still didn’t get played. Oops.

We actually had a great time doing it and enjoyed the dressing up and play-acting. When Barney put ‘Ace’ in white tape (don’t ask) on the back of his jacket, it felt like the crowning touch. We thought there was no way you could not get the gag.

But when we next went to America in 1988, the record and video had been a hit and loads of people came to see us expecting to see a heavy-metal band, then asking for their money back when it turned out we were four scally Mancs playing sequenced pop music.

First, though, we had our 1987 American tour to negotiate.