By 1992 the party was over – thanks to regular outbreaks of violence at the city’s clubs, ‘Madchester’ had become ‘Gunchester’, and Factory Records was in dire financial trouble. The reasons were manifold. They included all 1990 and 1991’s bad luck efforts as well as this year producing various tax issues, added to the expense of opening the FAC281 shop in Affleck’s Palace, New Order’s new LP and then Happy Mondays’ abortive recording in Barbados, as well as expensive and poor-selling releases from Revenge and Miaow. As the year wore on the label was too in debt to release either a proposed Haçienda Classics album (foolishly the record label never capitalised on the success or influence of the club) or a ‘new bands’ compilation that might have featured Oasis and Pulp. Also Tony’s efforts to launch ‘In the City’ added more financial pressure on the already very stretched label.
New Order-wise, it was pretty good at first, without Barney there. Occasionally we’d drop off a CD or tape for him to listen to and work on, but I doubt he ever bothered to listen. At this time there was no pressure to finish the album. Unfortunately time got away from us, as it has a habit of doing and, before you knew it, the financial deadlines were looming.
Factory was very worried, and in a panic they booked Real World and hired Stephen Hague to produce the album.
There was trouble brewing at Factory, causing more friction. Alan Erasmus was initially shocked when Tony wanted the label to pay £10,000 for development of ‘In the City’, the Manchester music convention project, but on reflection he thought it was a great idea, and a good investment. Tony used the money, to fly to first New York, then London, seeking sponsors. Then, when funding was finally secured for the project from Manchester City Council (£25,000), Alan found out that all the money had gone into a separate new company, with nothing coming back to Factory. But we had to carry on. It was time to go back to work.
I’ll be honest. I wasn’t that keen on returning to Real World, especially with Stephen Hague. Still, Barney reckoned we should use him because not only had we proved a chart-busting combination on ‘True Faith’ and ‘World in Motion’, but he’d stop us lot from arguing among ourselves.
Anyway, he wanted him, and, if you haven’t already got the picture, what Barney wants, Barney gets – especially in the mood he was in. He was livid: ‘Having to make an album under such circumstances, making an album purely for financial reasons, is the death of creativity!’ he said, and he was dead right. But God bless him and give him his due, he worked really hard on that record. Unfortunately a lot of his hard work involved putting our hard work to the sword.
Because we were so behind, as in, Barney had done no vocals at all, we were running two studios in Real World simultaneously, which meant that we recorded our parts separately in the Big Room – the one where the ducks floated past – for Hague to mould into a nearly finished product. Then it was sent into the Pagoda (a smaller studio, actually Peter Gabriel’s personal writing room) for Barney to try vocals. He was basically starting from scratch.
Running two studios meant we needed more engineers than usual, so Owen Morris was brought on board. Owen had been engineering for Electronic. He came in to work for Barney, and spent a lot of time in the Pagoda nodding enthusiastically at Barney’s every utterance. I had a feeling he was a bit of a yes-man. (Owen went on to be one of my favourite producers, Which Bitch? for the View being a particular favourite. From the stories I heard he went as mad as Hannett, and to me sounded as good.)
So began a process where the material that me, Gillian and Steve had written at their farmhouse, and then subsequently recorded in the Big Room in Real World, underwent a strange metamorphosis once it reached the Pagoda. A record that began as a possible New Order record, slowly became, in my opinion, an Electronic one.
Now, you may be thinking, Shut the fuck up, Hooky, because Republic is a beloved New Order album and was our best-selling record to date, so I did all right out of it. But to be a hired hand is not why I formed a group. Meantime, it was still the case that the best way to clear a studio was for me to pick up my bass. Gradually the group drifted even further apart than we already were. Much further and we would have been in different postcodes.
How did we cope? By getting off our heads. Before this point we’d all had a bit of a dalliance with crack. You may find this hard to believe, but it wasn’t me who got into it the most – although to be fair we’d all had a go and developed a bit of a taste for it. I remember a certain member of our entourage telling me about taking it for the first time. He sucked it back and then, as he exhaled, said, ‘If I ever make a million pounds I’m going to spend it all on this.’
The thing with crack is that it’s better than coke while you’re doing it. It’s much smoother, warmer and not as edgy, but really intense. But then afterwards it’s like being ripped apart by a team of wild horses. The comedown is that bad, you’d happily slit your own throat. Plus, of course – famously – it really gets its claws into you. I watched a couple of mates of mine do £3,000 worth in one night, then get up in the morning for a taxi to pick up another couple of grands’ worth and then do that, too, in one sitting. This guy was telling me how he’d smoked five cars and three apartments before he finally stopped,
‘How?’ said I.
‘Got five years for GBH,’ he said. ‘Kicked it in the Big House!’
I heard that others had fallen hard too. A hairdresser, who used to deal me up, told me he’d been with some of them once and they were fighting over some white rocks on the carpet that they thought had been dropped. When they put it in the pipe, it turned out to be cheese. Hard cheese. God only knows what they were putting in their sandwiches.
Even so, at Real World we were mainly about the booze and charlie. Some had taken to balancing it out with ‘jellies’.
Benzodiazepines (benzos, temazies, jellies, eggs, moggies, vallies) are used to both counter the effect of ‘uppers’ like cocaine, speed and E, and ‘downers’ like heroin and booze. Usually doctor-prescribed drugs for reducing stress and anxiety, they promote calmness, relaxation and sleep, and work as antidepressants. Used as a ‘chill-out’ drug on the club scene or as a downer, the drug comes in tablet form, although it can be injected. Users can experience forgetfulness, confusion, irritability and drowsiness.
They were little green gels that you’d slit with a razor blade then squeeze a line of the liquid onto your hand, like the trail of a slug, licking it after a line of coke. I stuck with booze. We had barrels sent from Dry 201 and set up our own bar in the studio, so we were able to get pissed as farts at any time. This was the beginning of my proper alcoholism. I was in that boorish power-drinking phase where Stephen Hague would ask for a half-pint of bitter and I’d be, ‘Half-pint? You fucking girl! Here y’are . . .’ and give him three pints and six vodkas. Some evenings I’d drive back to Manchester like a maniac, picking up loads of drugs, then speeding back, them lot waiting for me. We’d stay up until four or five in the morning, sleep, get up about midday, work through until nine, or in Barney’s case four in the morning, and then do the same again.
We had people coming down to Real World with drugs for us but I liked to go and get them myself, total addict behaviour: wanting to be in control of the amount I had, so I could be sure I had ‘enough’, and ‘enough’ was always more than anyone else – twice as much. I remember Gillian expressing amazement that I had so much of the stuff, a great big phial full of it.
I was getting pissed all the time. Sometimes I’d stay down in Bath for the weekend and bring the Salford lot down and we’d go and blow £500 in a cocktail bar, off our fucking rockers rolling round Bath, which was nice because it was so laid-back. It just didn’t have the problems Manchester had. Me and Twinny would go to Moles nightclub in town and there would be no doormen, and the manager, ‘the lovely Jan’, would say, ‘We just don’t need them.’ We were amazed.
We went to Glastonbury that summer, me, Twinny and Jim Beswick (a mate from Salford), and Jim got set on fire. He’d passed out from too much of everything and we couldn’t carry him so we made a careful note of where he was and then left him. When we came back someone had sprayed lighter fluid on him (no wind, obviously) and set him alight. We woke him up, put him out and carried on.
During Glastonbury Peter Gabriel used to invite a lot of musicians to stay at Real World and the studio was full of people for those few days. I’d been on a bender and woke up absolutely starving. I could hear all the voices downstairs but my instinct for survival was too strong, I needed to eat. I crept downstairs in my dressing gown, studiously avoiding eye contact with anyone, and managing to pour out a bowl of cornflakes and add milk before shakily making my way to a seat at the communal table. My hands were shaking like Rob Gretton’s in the taxman’s office, but I made it, carefully sitting down. As I picked up the spoon I looked up. Sat opposite me was Lou Reed. Bloody Lou Reed, my hero. I went to pieces and had to run back to bed.
At work the massacre continued. We’d give Barney songs that we’d all agreed were more or less finished. All he needed to do was add a vocal, but we’d go in later in the evening to the Pagoda and the track would be unrecognisable. He’d say, ‘I couldn’t get anything over that verse music, so I rewrote it.’
I’d say, ‘Why didn’t you tell us? We could have worked on it for you.’ Him and Owen would just smirk at each other. He’d put some guitar on, and then it would get to the bridge and of course his new bit didn’t fit in with our bridge, so that would have to go, and he’d write another bridge, and then say that the chorus didn’t really go with the bridge, so he’d write another chorus, and that was it – elbows at dawn, or in this case, computer programmers.
Owen was so sycophantic he made me sick. Hague just agreed, I think because he wanted to get the record done as quickly as possible. That was what he was being paid to do. I don’t blame him for that. He took the path of least resistance. In Shadowplayers (James Nice’s book on Factory) Barney says our material wasn’t good enough. That simply wasn’t true. The material had been listened to by all of us, agreed to be good enough for work in progress before we even got to the studio.
Anyway, for me, the drink and the drugs took the edge off what he was doing to our work. For Steve and Gillian, well, I said that the writing at the farmhouse was their heyday and it was. But that meant they took it really badly. They were being dumped on from a great height. I was like, ‘Welcome to the club,’ but if you ask me, they never really got over it. Steve in particular was very, very quiet and reluctant to work after that, and I bet he still is now.
Siouxsie and the Banshees came in while we were there. Like John Lydon, Siouxsie’s one of those characters who’s always on. She’s always Siouxsie. Whatever time of day you see her, she’s dressed and made-up like she’s about to go on stage. We got on famously.
One time I got this dealer, a nice guy I knew from Bath, to cycle over and he brought me a load of gear. It wasn’t great but, believe you me, there wasn’t much knocking round in Bath at that time. It was him or nothing. He was pleased as punch to be doing it with him out of New Order and sat chunnering away until suddenly, without warning, Siouxsie leaned over and chinned him.
‘I don’t like you. I didn’t like him, Hooky,’ she explained airily, as she swanned off, leaving the poor guy sparkled on the floor.
Funnily enough, the next time I saw Siouxsie was at the 2005 Brit Awards, when we were making our comeback, presenting the award for Best International Group to the Scissor Sisters. I’d not long come back from rehab, and if you watch it on YouTube you can see that Barney aids my recovery by being completely off his head while I’m as sober as a judge. When we returned to our table after giving the award to the Scissors, we found Siouxsie sitting there with all the other record company folk, and I said, ‘Hello, love, how are you?’
She said, ‘All right, Hooky, I’m fine, nice to see you.’
And Bernard just said, ‘I’d love to fuck you up the arse.’ Straight out of the blue.
Oh, Jesus, I could have died. But still, you’ve got to hand it to him. If you’re going to get off your tits and loudly proclaim your desire for anal sex with Siouxsie Sioux, you might as well do it at the Brit Awards. I still cringe when I think of what I said to Tanya out of the Throwing Muses, but that one beat mine into a cocked hat – or should that be a coked wrap. All I can say is that he was bloody lucky she didn’t chin him, too; instead, she just stormed off.
The recording continued.
One night, with just me and Barney there, we decided to have a change and go for a meal in town. We assembled assorted tape operators, engineers and Stephen Hague and duly made our way to a lovely little French restaurant in Bath for a nice convivial meal.
At the end when the bill appeared, about £300, I watched as the tape-ops and engineers started raiding their piggy banks, fishing creased chequebooks out of their pockets, searching for their cheque-guarantee cards. So I said, ‘Don’t worry, lads, I’ll get it.’ And, grabbing the bill, I headed to the counter to pay. As I was sorting it out Barney appeared at my shoulder and grabbed my arm. ‘What did you do that for?’
‘What?’ says I.
‘Offer to pay for their meal. Why?’
‘Get out, they work really hard. They deserve a treat.’
‘They earn more money than you do,’ he spat.
‘Yeah, but they don’t get anything else, do they?’
‘Fuck that,’ he said, ‘I’d never buy them a meal.’ And he walked off.
I carried on and next thing he was back again, grabbing my arm. ‘And another thing, I’ll never buy you a meal either.’ And you know what? He never has.
Gradually, me, Steve and Gillian were written off the album. In the case of ‘Ruined in a Day’, ‘World’, ‘Spooky’, ‘Everyone Everywhere’ and ‘Liar’ we were completely written off them – as far as I am concerned it was becoming a Bernard Sumner solo album at our joint expense. The only concession made was ‘Avalanche’; Barney left that one alone.
But then – right at the end, when all the tracks were written, and all the backing vocals were done – Hague turned to me and said, ‘We should put some bass on the tracks now.’
Fuck me, that chat he had with Tom Atencio on ‘True Faith’ had really paid off. Sure enough, he lined up two 24-track machines to make 48, put a stereo mix of the track on two of them, a sync code on another one, and got me to jam 45 tracks of bass guitar on every song. It took days.
That cleared the studio better than a zombie attack, I can tell you, but the thing was, I got back on the album, and if you listen to Republic there’s actually quite a lot of bass on it. It’s low in places, but it’s there. It doesn’t really feel like it’s 100 per cent me, if that makes sense, because of the way it’s recorded, but I am on there, and thank God for that.
Despite that the whole experience of recording and mixing Republic was like one long case of good news/bad news. It was great going out and getting trashed with my mates – and at one point I even nicked a girl out from under Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin’s nose.
By this time we were mixing in RAK Studios near Regent’s Park (the studio was owned by Mickie Most who, impressively, would park his Rolls-Royce right outside and then retire to his office all day). Robert Plant was recording there too, and we were both flirting like mad with the catering girl, who was lovely. I eventually won by inviting her to a Haçienda night at seOne and when we were trollied she ended up staying with me for two days in the hotel. Turns out she used to serve up a very famous musician with coke supplied by terrorists. She’d travel around with them on tour all the time with three ounces shoved up her judy (fookin’ hell, I was amazed, she was tiny). Anyway, back at the studio after dinner we’d retire to the recreation room for a kiss and a cuddle and we were really going for it when I opened my eyes and stood there outside the window was Robert Plant, alternately pointing at me and making a fist, smashing it into his other hand. I smiled and gave him the Manchester Vs. He was actually a very nice man and, apart from trying to sell me his dodgy old Mercedes, was a real gentleman. We got on well – but sadly, relations with my group were at an all-time low; we were hardly ever together in any of the studios. I was pleased that I’d been brought back into the fold musically, but then I had nothing to do with the mixing of the album, which was something I’d always been involved with in the past.
Hague did everything and, no matter what you said or suggested, mainly that the bass was really quiet, á la ‘True Faith’, nothing ever changed. The whole thing was very unsatisfactory for me, to say the least. Apart from all this it was very difficult to feel involved with an album you were convinced was your last as New Order. Steve and Gillian, in my opinion, were heartbroken. Forgive me for not doing a track by track, but I can’t.
Plus, of course, there was the business with Factory . . .
By July of that year a long-gestating deal between Factory and London Records fell through when those negotiating on behalf of London – chairman Tracy Bennett, CEO Roger Ames and general manager Colin Bell – became aware that Factory had little worth buying apart from Joy Division and New Order. As author James Nice says in his account of the Factory Records story, Shadowplayers, ‘[Tony Wilson] could no longer hide the fact that Factory had few significant assets to sell, apart from a desirable brand name and a mountain of debt. . . . Viewed objectively, no sane corporate buyer would have purchased Factory as a going concern, and London hit on the idea of allowing the target company to slide into receivership, with the hope and possibility of salvaging certain key assets from the administrators . . .’
They hoped those assets would include Joy Division and New Order.
Tony had been negotiating with London for so long that it just wasn’t funny any more. It was driving both him and Rob crazy. We were starting to have a very bad feeling, a feeling we’d had all along about the attitude of major labels. He was trying to persuade London into signing the entire roster, but London didn’t want the Railway Children or Revenge or whoever was on Factory Classical that week, they just wanted the big names – New Order, Joy Division, Happy Mondays – and in the end London decided to wait for Factory to go bump and then swoop in and clear up, like vultures.
Seeing this was the case, Rob referred to our old agreements with Tony where it was stated that the master tapes and copyrights were returned to us six months after delivery. It meant London couldn’t buy us from Factory or from the liquidator (if Factory went bust), they had to deal with us direct.
Our new London deal was taking a long time. Their lawyers were a bunch of bastards. Me and Rob used to go to London, guerrilla-style, hang around the Groucho and pounce on Tracy Bennett and Colin Bell to try and get them to hurry it up; Rob was getting more and more desperate for the money. We had some great times with Tracy and Colin, actually; they were a right pair of party animals. But it looked like nothing could stop Factory going bankrupt.
We had to suffer nearly a month of emergency meetings, day after day, with no remedy in sight. Factory’s demise was a long, drawn-out process, with London Records and Roger Ames playing a huge part.
At first they offered lifelines only to then withdraw them. Things gradually changed as we removed ourselves from the mess. London began courting New Order and Joy Division and the liquidator, too, so they could get the rest of Factory’s assets, a proper harvest.
‘Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell,’ said Tony. Neither he nor Factory could survive any longer. Rob was relieved and happy that we had extricated ourselves from what looked like a precarious situation. Still having fresh flowers delivered on the last day of trading and leaving the stock cupboard open for the staff to help themselves, Tony was generous to the end. I got a phone call to come down and join A Certain Ratio going through the skip outside the building (containing everything that wasn’t nailed down).
The liquidator wasn’t very happy either that he’d lost his two biggest assets, New Order and Joy Division, but that’s life. And lucky for us. Phew. He did fight legally with London for a couple of years for our return after they signed us independently post-Factory’s demise, but didn’t succeed.
Meanwhile, me and Rob came up with a great idea to buy the Factory building for ourselves. After all, we had already paid for it. A phone call to the liquidator valued it at £250,000, a third of what Tony had spent. A quick call to our bank NatWest and we were ready with an offer on 25 November, only to be told it had been sold. To whom we could not find out. We were devastated. We later learned it was our greatest copyists, Peter Dalton and Carol Ainscow, who had grabbed it, and we weren’t able to table a higher offer. They’d already opened a bar that was a direct rip-off of Dry 201 and now this: they nicked in with a higher offer and bought the Factory building from under our noses, which seemed highly unfair to Factory’s creditors. They later opened it as a club, Paradise Factory.
We were devastated to see Factory go, of course. They were our friends and we’d helped to build the label from the start. On the other hand, we were the people who had written the songs on which Factory was built, and the label had repaid us by never paying us – by taking our money and sinking it into a nightclub and a bar and a building for themselves, plus a load of other crap groups – so it’s fair to say we had mixed feelings about it. It’s hard not to sound callous.
Later, when we moved the mixing of Republic to RAK, Colin Bell and Tracy Bennett came to the studio, to ‘help’, sitting at the back, definitely the worse for wear, making ridiculous suggestions. It was one of the funniest studio sessions I’d ever attended, watching these two wind up Stephen Hague like you wouldn’t believe. ‘Why don’t you put a lion roaring on that track?’ ‘Let’s get a barbershop quartet for this bit.’
In the end Hague lost it completely and chucked us all out. We ended up back at the Groucho where the carnage continued until Tracy grabbed me and said, ‘Come on, we’re going to Browns.’
We got in this limo outside, and the driver goes, ‘Oh, sorry, I’m waiting for Mr Lenny Henry,’ but Tracy said, ‘I am Lenny Henry, now fucking drive,’ and the driver’s going, ‘No, Mr Henry’s a black gentleman,’ and Tracy said, ‘Just drive. I’m Lenny Henry, Masambula! Fucking drive!’
Meanwhile, with the album near completion, Barney asked for a larger share of the publishing. Apart from ‘World in Motion’, the publishing had always been split five ways. No matter that Rob never contributed musically, and Gillian only very rarely, they still got an even split and a band vote. I had suspected this was on the horizon. I kept hearing him, ‘Johnny says this . . . Johnny says that . . .’ New Order had always split everything equally. The Smiths famously hadn’t.
Barney, meanwhile, would take great delight in dropping in that us three weren’t even on ‘World’ or ‘Ruined in a Day’, how he’d just written them himself. It certainly did rankle – and it wasn’t fucking true, either, as we’ll shortly discover.
Rob was terrified. He wanted all this sorted out and he didn’t want anything to get in the way of the London deal. He persuaded us to take the cut. Barney wanted 50 per cent of the band’s cut, so that left 50 per cent between us three (and Rob got his normal 20 per cent off the top – no pay cut for him).
I saw my chance. Should I suggest Gillian giving over more of her share? In my opinion she had been more than fairly treated on all the other records from Movement to Technique, getting more than she should have done. Maybe now was the time for her to admit Barney did most if not all of the keyboard work and hand over some, if not all, of her publishing.
But if it was the last New Order record, was it really worth upsetting the fucking applecart so badly? I had got on really well with them at the start of Republic and they felt like friends. I thought, Fuck it, and we shared the cut, going down to 16.666 recurring (the mark of the devil). Rob was delighted. Nothing could stand in our way now. Could it?
Then Stephen Hague asked for publishing on five songs.
Barney went nuts and wanted to refuse. ‘Tell him to fuck off! I did everything,’ he cried. But, being all too aware that we really needed to get the album out, Rob persuaded us to agree again. Next thing we knew the publishing had been split six ways.
It was a very, very sour end to a fairly sour recording experience, which haunts me every time I hear the bloody record.