Well, it wasn’t like it spoiled the tour or anything, but I suppose you’d have to say that it opened a new chapter of the story, because at Irvine Meadows, just outside LA – one of my favourite venues – Barney made his shock announcement.
To be precise, it was before the gig. There was a Factory meeting in a hotel nearby. Typical Tony. Typical Factory. He flew over, of course, as well as Alan Erasmus and a couple of accountants, spending thousands upon thousands of pounds in order to talk about how much debt Factory was in; how much money the Haçienda was losing, all the usual kind of shit.
Barney must have been gearing himself up to say something because he’d sat on the windowsill for the duration of the meeting, as though he was too nervous to join the rest of us at the table, and then, at some point, he just said it. He just sort of blurted out that he wanted to work with other people. I think we were talking about future plans for the next record or something.
It certainly cast a cloud over the gathering, I can tell you that much. Every meeting we had in those days was about how we would be saving something or someone, all sorts of pie-in-the-sky projections that even if you knew weren’t going to come off were at least grounded in one definite reality – which was that we were going to be making another record together.
Suddenly, we might not be making another record together, because Barney wanted to work with other people. History tells us that he went off to do Electronic with Neil Tennant and Johnny Marr (who maybe approached him on that 1986 tour, after he’d approached me – who knows?), and that New Order would reconvene for several more albums. But you’ve got to remember that at the time we didn’t know that. All we knew was that Barney wanted to work with other people. On the face of it, it sounded quite reasonable, because he’d no doubt learned lots of tricks from producers like John Robie and Stephen Hague, and he’d been feted by his peers – the Pet Shop Boys, for example – as one of the driving forces in synthpop, and when you look at it like that, you can hardly blame him for wanting to stretch his wings and escape the group dynamic.
But I didn’t see it like that. I saw it like, ‘He wants to work with other people. Which means he doesn’t want to work with me.’
We’d all had our little musical holidays before. I remember being pleased as punch to earn £150 for playing on one of Martha Ladly’s solo singles, ‘Light Years from Love’.
Martha Ladly, of Martha and the Muffins, has something of a walk-on part in the New Order Story. Having left the group, she began a short-lived solo career; at the same time she lived and worked with Peter Saville, one of her paintings being used on the sleeve of the NewOrder EP ‘Factus 8 – 1981–1982’. After two decades in Britain, Ladly returned to Canada and is currently a professor of design at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
The story of New Order is in some senses the story of a coup: how a band went from being a democracy to a dictatorship, and of course, it was a typically Barney, bloodless, passive-aggressive coup, in that it happened bit by bit, brick by brick, decision by decision.
It looked obvious, the elbowing me aside in the recording studio, the bullying of Rob, the time-keeping . . . and now this. Barney was throwing his toys out of the pram one by one. Maybe he assumed we’d all be waiting for him when he decided to return. Maybe we would. He played the irreplaceable-frontman card and won the hand. From that moment onwards we were wondering what Barney might do next, whether we were surplus to requirements, and it cast a pall of doubt and uncertainty over the whole band from then on. You might even say it was the moment we stopped being a ‘group’ in the proper sense of the word.
After the meeting we got in our separate limos to go to the gig. I remember being absolutely gagging for a drink and stuck in traffic all the way to Irvine Meadows and being a right obnoxious brat and kicking off, going, ‘This is bloody stupid, all this traffic, ridiculous, nah nah nah.’
The driver had been getting more and more nervous, shifting in his seat, until at last the divider slid down. He turned around and said, ‘Man, these cars you’re complaining about are all your fans. They’re coming to see you.’
He was right. It was a sell-out gig and I’m kicking off in the car because of it. I couldn’t explain it then and I can’t explain it now but it was a very, very strange feeling indeed.
After that Barney was constantly on the phone, making arrangements. Once, he left his Filofax open in the kitchen area of our practice room and, well, you’ve got to look, haven’t you? Lo and behold, there on the opening pages were all sorts of plans for the people he wanted to work with, Stephen Hague featuring prominently. There was even a section marked ‘touring’ full of the places he wouldn’t play with us. It was absolutely heartbreaking.
But at the time? Guess what we did. That’s right. In time-honoured tradition, we ignored the discontent festering at our core and we just carried on.
Cue Dad’s Army music. ‘Don’t tell them your name, Pike!’
With the tour drawing to a close in California, we stayed at the good old Sunset Marquis, and I whiled away many a happy afternoon shopping on Melrose Avenue, where all the shop assistants were beautiful, mainly out-of-work actors and actresses.
In one particular vintage store I’d spotted a beautiful 1960s James Dean-style leather jacket. It cost $675. A lot of money. I had been to see it about three times, and as we were preparing to leave for the airport, I could no longer resist. I said to Terry, ‘I’ve got to go and get that jacket. I’ll see you at LAX,’ and tore down to Melrose.
When I got to the shop the jacket was still there. It was meant to be. I took it to the counter. It was getting seriously close to my departure time but there was only one guy in front of me, a short dude clutching an old pair of cowboy boots. He offered them to the shop assistant, who said, ‘That’ll be seventy-five dollars, please.’
‘Oh, man,’ the short dude said, ‘they’re really battered. How about I give you forty-five?’
‘Sixty-five,’ the shoppie countered.
Oh shit.
I was getting really fidgety. They were going backwards and forwards for what seemed like hours, in increments of five dollars. I was at boiling point and was going to offer to buy the fucking boots myself when at long last they settled on $50.
The guy paid and, as he turned round clutching his new ‘old’ boots, he barged into me . . . it was fucking Bruce Springsteen, the tight bastard.
He then got on a customised Harley outside that must have cost a fortune. I was so shocked I forgot about my flight for a moment. Then, coming to, I paid and legged it. I just made it. Terry was sweating even more profusely than usual when I got there and had to give me a bump in the security queue to get over it.
As we flew home I regaled them all with my tales of meeting Brucie, and even the air stewardesses, who we knew quite well by this time, were joining us in the toilets for a little Brucie bonus. It made the flight fly by, if you’ll forgive the pun.
The year ended nicely, with a request from Tony to record the music for a new TV football show featuring George Best and Rodney Marsh, the imaginatively titled Best & Marsh. It was a nice bit of synchronicity for me as I’d got George Best’s job at the Manchester Ship Canal company way back in 1973 (see Unknown Pleasures). To make the tune we wangled a free afternoon at Granada TV’s studio. Merry Christmas.