In June 2000, Becky and I moved to Alderley Edge. Funnily enough, it was at Barney’s suggestion. His philosophy is that you should move to the best area you can afford so you can send your kids to the local state school and save on private education fees. To this day me and Barney still live there, and I occasionally see him on the high street, when we’ll stop, chat and reminisce over old times, slapping each other’s backs with great gusto, all our many differences forgotten (in your dreams).
It was also around that time that I went to a specialist for my irritable bowel syndrome. Nasty business, IBS. It had started in around 1997 and tended to get worse in times of stress with the group, as in all the time. Really suffering with it, I went to the best specialist in the North, who funnily enough also lived in Alderley Edge, where I was told I’d have to have a colonoscopy. I mentioned I was nervous. ‘Don’t worry,’ they said, ‘we’ll give you a shot, you won’t remember anything.’
That seemed odd to me – ‘you won’t remember anything’? – but I submitted all the same. Just before the shot, the nurse said to me, ‘I’m glad you’re here. He’s got a full set of New Order now.’
They were right, I didn’t remember anything afterwards – apart from that comment. But the funny thing about the IBS was that when the group split in 2007, my IBS went for good. In one fell swoop, I’d lost two major pains in the arse.
Anyway, back to 2000, and the album was announced at the beginning of the year. In short order we decamped to the studio – back to the Real World. We’d be there for a long time.
Steve Osborne was producing; he was well known by now as half of the Perfecto Records production team with Paul Oakenfold. He’d got our gig by doing a great job of producing the track that was to be New Order’s comeback song, ‘Brutal’, on the soundtrack of The Beach. I had read the book in 1996 and loved it.
We recorded the track first with Rollo out of Faithless and it sounded good, but as Rollo spun more of his magic on it he lost us, and in the end we didn’t like his version at all. Steve Osborne was brought in to save the day. We were well into recording Get Ready by the time the film came out in 2000, and we rolled up to the premiere along with every other band on the Pete Tong-produced soundtrack.
The Beach director Danny Boyle had done Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, both of them famed for their innovative use of music, so we were dead excited to see how the song had been used, thinking it would be different from the usual case of hearing it on a radio in the background. How was it used? It was featured on a radio playing in the background, in a shack with a tin roof, during a monsoon. You can’t trust film-makers, you really can’t.
Which was again proved by our next foray into film, Mission: Impossible II. We had been told Tom Cruise was a huge New Order fan and that supplying the track beforehand was just a formality. It was fun to record, turning out a lot better than I expected. I was able to really let rip on the bass sound. Unfortunately we lost out to Limp Bizkit, who were huge at the time.
Back to Get Ready. Alan Wise called up. Would we like Jerry Lee Lewis to provide piano for a track? Alan was promoting him at the time and Barney really liked the idea – that was, until the subject of money came up. What did the ‘Great Balls of Fire’ hit-maker want to play on our track? He said he’d do it for the same money he got for his first-ever session in the early 1950s, which was with Elvis. We thought, Great, it’ll be peanuts, but he must have been adjusting for inflation and then some, because the price he quoted was $50,000. Balls of fire? Balls of brass, more like. We told him to sling his hook.
As ever the producer of the album was an issue. I liked Steve Osborne, but I was still of the opinion the group should produce the album. Again Barney said, ‘I don’t want to argue with you, Hooky. I want things to be different. A new session, a new start . . .’
‘But it’s better when we argue, because we produce better music,’ said I.
He wouldn’t have it, and what Barney wants Barney gets, even when we’re getting along, and, hey, at least his reasoning here was sound and I did understand. He was at least paying lip service to the idea of the greater good. In the past and future, Barney’s interpretation of compromise was that it was something that you did and sometimes he would wait very patiently until you capitulated.
At Real World Steve and Gillian hardly ever came. They were still working on other versions at home then sending them to us in Bath. They developed a habit of arriving late on a Thursday afternoon, poncing round for a bit, having something to eat at seven and then going home again. The tracks they sent were the kind of thing they’d been doing as the Other Two, not New Order songs at all. Me and Barney opened the window and let them fly away.
This being the case, we ended up having to close ranks, aware that we would not finish it otherwise, and ended up writing most of the album with Steve Osborne in Real World, who contributed to making it one of the best New Order recording experiences I’d had for a long, long time. As with Republic we were writing with a producer, only now I was included. I remember being asked to work on ‘60 Miles an Hour’ on my own while Barney worked on the vocals. Recording it with Pottsy, Barney was delighted that I wrote the keyboard-based ending. I was laying bass on all the tracks and people were actually staying in the studio. There weren’t many of us there: me, Barney, Steve, a keyboard programmer (£1,000 a day, no publishing) and Andy Robinson, who looked after us really well. Barney was giving me encouragement all the time, suggesting improvement after improvement for the bass. It was a very happy, harmonious period for both of us.
Some of Barney’s old tricks were still apparent – doing his own backing vocals and his awful timekeeping. Back in the days of Low-Life and Brotherhood, Barney used to say that the early hours were when the ideas came to him, like the ideas were pixies or something (Jesus, you can see why we never really got on, can’t you?). Being nocturnal was normal for him, a point of pride. The odd hours, always starting after lunchtime and working until 11 p.m-ish. I alternated five-mile walks in the morning, accompanied by my faithful spaniel Mia, with long gym sessions in the Lucknam Park hotel nearby, working off the booze from the night before. It wasn’t a problem yet, but I was drinking a fair bit, starting with cocktail hour at 6 p.m., a double Bloody Mary, then getting through a bottle of wine while the others did a glass, finishing off another two before I’d stagger to bed. There was also hardly any drugs, only on high days and holidays. It felt almost healthy.
For a couple of weeks we recorded at Monnow Valley in Wales, which was very isolated and quiet, nowhere here to get into any trouble. The owner took great delight in showing us the piano Freddie Mercury played on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and told us great stories about Queen’s roadies.
It seems that when they recorded here, they turned up driving sports cars, full of drugs, with pretty blondes on their arms and this guy was talking to them asking, ‘When are your roadies arriving with the gear?’
‘We are the roadies,’ they said, ‘but we have our own roadies doing the gear. Don’t tell the band, will ya!’
Duly, the ‘other’ roadies arrived, set up the gear and then disappeared, leaving the glamour roadies to take all the glory when the band finally turned up.
Steve Osborne was great here and he took Barney’s ‘Crystal’ and changed the soft electronic backing track completely, even waking me up at some godawful hour to put some lead bass on, turning it into the tour de force it became. To be honest, I didn’t mind being woken up, in fact I was delighted. We’d worked on the track together, and it was a great one, and being woken up in the middle of the night to play bass was much better than arriving in the morning to find that your work has been wiped and replaced. It was definitely another step forward.
Sometimes Barney would get absorbed, as always. The thing about him is that he’s incredibly lazy unless he’s in the studio, where he’s happy spending hours, days and millions of pounds, redoing synth and guitar parts ad infinitum as long as he’s waited on hand and foot. I’ve said it before, but he’s a real creature of the studio.
So, you know how it goes. One door opens, another one closes, and although the Monaco bit of my life was on permanent hiatus, I was still very excited about what lay in store for New Order. An album that had begun life slowly and tentatively in Steve and Gillian’s farmhouse at the tail-end of 1998 was, by the end of 2000, beginning to look like it might actually come out soon. We moved to Hook End Studios, near Checkendon in Oxfordshire, to mix the tracks. Originally owned by Alvin Lee of Ten Years After, then sold to Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd, it had ended up in the hands of Trevor Horn, who brought it under his Sarm West umbrella. This place was fantastic and, looking back, I can see that this was where my drinking went into another gear. I was regaling everyone at dinner with drunken stories night after night, getting louder and louder as the session went on. I thought it was the highlight of their day. I’m sure the others thought otherwise.
One night, after a bender with Ken Niblock, we nearly got an album title when Barney declared, ‘Houston, we have a problem!’ at the sight of my face. It was shelved later – the title, not my face.
In a big change for us we decided to bring in some special guests, with Billy Corgan (guitar and vocals) and Bobby Gillespie (vocals) working on the tracks ‘Turn My Way’ and ‘Rock the Shack’ respectively. Bobby was a pussycat, of course, and it was a really enjoyable afternoon, but Billy was something else entirely.
I knew he had a reputation as being a little difficult but even I wasn’t prepared for what went on. He’d played some wild guitar for the break, and it was apparently fantastic, but unfortunately our engineer, Bruno, didn’t press save on the computer, so it was lost.
Now, I’ve lost umpteen thousands of words of this very book by making the same mistake Bruno did, and I know that once something is wiped, it ain’t coming back: you can either beat yourself up about it from now until kingdom come, or just get on with it, or . . .
There’s a third way. Let’s call it the Billy Corgan Method. I was in the main house when one of the engineers ran over to say there was a problem in the studio and when I got there it was pandemonium. Billy was going berserk at poor, apologetic Bruno, and I have never seen anybody moan, whine and threaten as much as he did that afternoon. He was following Bruno around the studio, screaming blue murder at him until he’d reduced the poor bloke to tears.
Truth is, Billy’s a great bloke. We’ll come to how he saved my bacon and put up with me being a total tosspot shortly, and fair play, as soon as I pointed out that he was being a twat, and that Bruno was my mate and he couldn’t talk to him like that, he stopped behaving like one immediately.
Meanwhile, Barney would fall out with Steve Osborne over production and mixing problems but leave me alone. I was ‘good cop’ at long last. The only blemishes of the whole session came at the end. The first was when the record company sent ‘Crystal’ to Mark ‘Spike’ Stent for remixing and instead of coming back sounding £10,000 and two points different, his version was almost exactly the same. Steve O was delighted, of course.
The second was when the Chemical Brothers were employed to produce ‘Here to Stay’. I am a huge fan of the Chems musically and personally, Ed and Tom are a lovely pair of blokes and great musicians, and the suggestion to use them to produce this in-between-album song I thought was a great idea. Intended as an extra track for the 24 Hour Party People soundtrack album, it had been recorded by Steve Osborne on the Get Ready sessions and left over. I spent ages with Andy Robinson, recording the bass in Real World, coming up with loads of slightly different bass riffs all through the song. Normally I would have picked the best out and wiped the others but Andy suggested leaving it to the Chems. The song was sent off and when the mix came back my bass was all over it, literally all over it, all the riffs. Barney said, ‘We can’t have that.’
When I asked why they’d left all the riffs in, Tom said, ‘It was weird, Hooky, we couldn’t decide and neither of us could press the delete button on any of them. So we left them all in. It was you, we love your bass.’
Strangely, Barney had no such qualms and when we went down to the lads’ studio in London it turned into one of our biggest tussles, with Barney trying to persuade me it should just come in halfway through the second chorus and giving me a long list of reasons why, mainly, ‘It’s getting in the way of the vocal.’
‘Good,’ I said, and this time stuck to my guns. While I didn’t get the intro, I come in halfway through the first verse. Still, it was all getting a bit too déjà vu. (PS: I did think this would have made as good a football tune as ‘World in Motion’ and should have been released as such but . . .)
That November we went to the Q Awards. Hosted by my old mate Davina McCall, it was a particularly wild event, with the Oasis–Robbie feud kicking off in style and yours truly driving people mad by being so off my head, shouting out ‘New Order’ at the top of my lungs as they announced every award. In fact, I was such a pain that Barney asked one of our handlers to give me a line of coke to help straighten me out, only it turned out to be such a huge line I could hardly speak and had to resort to starting a food fight instead.
Up on stage to receive our award, Barney quipped that I couldn’t speak because I’d had one Viagra too many – the funny bugger – and then Davina was mortified when I found my tongue and used the opportunity to try and remind her of an occasion she’d no doubt rather forget involving my hotel-room coffee table. All in all, not one of my finest moments.
Back to Get Ready, and a really good album experience was ending on a positive note. I know that Get Ready isn’t considered a New Order classic but personally it’s one of my favourites, much better for me than the dreaded Republic. Not only that, but a buoyant Barney was again saying things that were like music to my ears. ‘This is great record . . .’ he’d say, sitting at the control desk.
It was!
‘And we’ve had a great time making it . . .’
We had! I mean, it had taken a long time, but for one reason or another – clicking with the producer, the diversion of other projects – we’d had a good time recording it.
‘And you know what we need to do? We need to tour the arse off it. Really get out there and play it to people. Really show them what a great album this is.’
Yes!
Oh my God, this was like heaven to hear. For Andy Robinson as well. We danced round the studio. Andy was saying to me, ‘Did he really just say that?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, he definitely said it,’ because Barney wasn’t talking about doing thirteen dates this time. He was talking about doing thirteen countries. We were going to get out there and tour the arse off this album and, maybe for Rob, we’d even be as big as them Irish twats. This was going to be absolutely wild. I couldn’t wait.