At the beginning of 2001, with Get Ready completed and plans for New Order to resume touring in hand, Gillian decided not to play live. We’d been trying to sort out publishing for the new record – the bane in the life of any group, an issue almost guaranteed to drive a wedge between you and everybody else – when during a meeting Andy and Rebecca told us that she wouldn’t be joining us for the live dates. It hardly came as a surprise, considering her parental responsibilities. I understood why she wouldn’t want to join the group on a gruelling tour, never mind the gruelling rehearsals.
We were desperate to keep Steve, of course. Despite him not having done much on this album, he was an integral part of the band’s history and sound, ‘live’ especially, but we were happy to let Gillian go. Very happy, in fact.
Picture this: me and Barney dancing around the studio, arms round each other, over the moon that there was no more having to carry someone who I thought was a bit of a passenger; no more having the world think that someone brought something of value to New Order when they didn’t. (Disclaimer: Now, I know it sounds a bit heartless. But, I’m relating it to you from my point of view, and from that perspective – and that perspective only.)
Get Ready cost so much to make – £505,000 – that after two years of making it we got just £15,000 each in wages at the end, money left over from the advance. However, the publishing for Get Ready actually ended up being quite easy to sort out. Me and Barney splitting 80 per cent: fifty to him, thirty to me, Steve getting fifteen and Gillian getting five, which we felt was fair.
As part of the using-different-producers doctrine, our old friend Flood was enlisted to re-record and remix ‘Rock the Shack’. We first met Flood, a.k.a. Mark Ellis, you might remember, when we were mixing Movement with Martin Hannett in Sarm West in London. He had just joined as assistant engineer/tea boy and was very nice and enthusiastic. Over the years he would become very famous because of his work with artists such as U2, Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode, among many others.
Again, while I hated the idea of all the producers the thought of a few days in Dublin really appealed. Ever since our time there recording Brotherhood the city has an uncanny knack of feeling very much like a second home. At the same time, though, our radio promotion people had identified a problem with the single ‘Crystal’. It seemed it was heading for the playlist of Radio 2 only (presumably because of the band’s age?). For us this was thought of as the kiss of death and plans were made to do a bit of major arse-licking to get it back on the Radio 1 playlist.
But how? Easy, we invited the head programmer of Radio 1 for a weekend jolly with us in Dublin, all expenses paid, staying at U2’s Clarence Hotel for good measure.
This seemed like a good idea until he turned up and, as Twinny would say, ‘He’s not one of us, Hooky!’ The guy was an absolute turkey and was outspoken and annoying right from when we took him for dinner in the Clarence and then on to Nells nightclub after. I hated him with a vengeance and, once I was obnoxiously pissed, decided to get me and him right off our heads. I turned into a right cokehound, badgering everyone I came across for charlie, but it was proving to be very difficult indeed, with everyone from the punters on the dancefloor to the cloakroom girl being unable to help. Then, just as I was beginning to lose all hope, a guy sidles up to me and whispers out of the side of his mouth, the true time-honoured druggy greeting, ‘You want some action?’ We retired to the toilets where he relieved me of a hundred quid and gave me five magic beans . . . well tablets, rhubarb and custard capsules.
‘Ecstasy,’ he said. ‘Be careful, they’re very strong.’
‘Yeah, I bet they are,’ says I, necking one. ‘Don’t worry, mate, I’m from Manchester. We invented the bloody stuff.’
Going back into the club I spied my mate from Radio 1 and smarmily said, ‘Shall I get you another drink, Tarquin?’
‘Yes please, Hookah, old boy,’ he says.
I got the drink and seized the opportunity to empty two of the capsules’ contents into it, then, sniggering to myself like Muttley off Wacky Races, I started to walk across the club. I thought I looked normal but Andy Robinson tells me later I looked and walked like a Thunderbirds puppet right across the dancefloor. Turns out Andy had been keeping an eye on me and grabbed me just before I got to Tarquin. ‘What the fuck are you doing? You trying to kill him?’
He then tries to grab the very cloudy and weirdly foaming half of lager from me, attempting to wrestle it from my grasp. I thought, Hey up! kicked him in the shin then necked it in one.
Fuck me, then I am off my nut completely and disgrace myself absolutely, ending up getting kicked out of the club and on my own in the closed bar at the Clarence, dancing in a dark corner.
The next day I was wrecked and crawled into the studio in tatters about three in the afternoon. Barney told me the session wasn’t working – another producer bites the dust – so we decided to have a brainstorming session on a title for the LP.
We’d not had much luck or inspiration and basically had a long, long list of crap titles. I said, ‘I always liked how the titles made sense in the way they ran: Unknown Pleasures; Closer; Still; Movement; Power, Corruption & Lies; Low-Life; Brotherhood; Substance; Technique; Republic (which I have to admit I felt was the joker in the pack); and here we are getting ready for a comeback and can’t think of one to save our lives!’
‘Hang on,’ says Barney. ‘Getting ready . . . Get Ready. How about that?’
Fuck me, we’d done it again. I went out that night and got absolutely hammered again to celebrate, ending up alone in a restaurant with no idea how I’d got there, what it was called or where it was and being so pissed I couldn’t even make it to the door. So I did what every other non-self-respecting alkie would have done and carried on drinking until I was the last one in the restauarant, then paid up and crashed out, staggering round Dublin for what seemed like hours until I found the bloody hotel. Shit, this drinking was becoming a real problem.
Preparing for live, Barney didn’t waste any time in suggesting a guitarist he had worked with in Electronic, Phil Cunningham, also from Macclesfield, who used to play with the group Marillion.
We’d also invited Billy Corgan to play with us on the tour, to ease our way back in. It seemed a nice idea to share the load with someone we respected and admired and vice versa, a sharing of the limelight. We were a little worried how our comeback would be perceived. The idea was that Billy would play the warm-up, then Fuji, then the North American dates – Moby’s travelling Area: One Festival, which featured Moby, us and Outkast – and then for a couple of the European shows.
It was a good thing he was only on a few of the dates, because although he attracted a crowd of adoring Goths wherever we went, he was costing us a fortune. Whereas we’d fly business he’d insist on first class (double ours), then he insisted on staying at some of the best hotels in certain places, the one in Paris costing £3,000 a night, whereas we’d be in one down the road for £300. No problem, it was just how he worked and we didn’t have to use him if we didn’t want to. Different people have different survival techniques. After all, we were forewarned.
Phil Cunningham came in as a session man, who as I said used to be in Marillion (he didn’t; actually it was Manchester’s own Marion, of course. I used to say it just to piss him off: ‘Oi! Where’s that Fish when you need him?’ I’d bellow after a few drinks) and who would play with us full-time from then on.
Phil seemed like a great guy. He brought a lot of confidence to the band, which gave Barney confidence, and – more importantly – he actually played very well. And you know what? We never played a bad gig after he joined. It was like someone had fixed the table with the wonky leg and all of a sudden it was just . . . better. Even Steve seemed much more relaxed.
Musically we were lifting off. Gillian still used to come to gigs occasionally and she’d be at the side of the stage in tears because she missed the old life.
The first date of our 35-gig, year-long tour was a warm-up at the Olympia in Liverpool, promoted by our old mate Alan Wise.
I’d recommended a foldback guy to the band. We’d used him in Monaco, an Irish bloke called Gerry Colclough who was, hands-down, the best foldback engineer I’d ever met, and a lovely man to boot. As you know, the sound on stage had been a major bone of contention throughout the history of New Order, so to finally get the foldback ninja on our team was bliss, and every gig with him was an absolute pleasure, even for Barney.
In Fuji we actually scored some of the best drugs ever too. It had always been notoriously difficult to score in Japan, the Japanese themselves being very anti-drugs. We were told an English guy was selling it in the backstage area.
‘How will we recognise him?’ we asked, only to be told, ‘You’ll recognise him. Don’t worry!’
We did, easily. He was completely off his nut, obligatory towel round his neck to mop up the rivers of snot pouring from both nostrils. ‘Aren’t you worried about getting caught?’ I asked. ‘No, man, them Japanese don’t know anything about drugs, they just think I’ve got a cold.’
In Fuji you stay right next to the festival in the old Naeba Ski hotel, which isn’t great, so we stayed up all night as a protest, ending up in a party room with Hothouse Flowers (where I was giving Liam daggers because in 1992 he’d stolen a girlfriend off me in Manchester – luckily, I couldn’t speak).
We gave up at dawn and sloped off to our rooms. The road crew carried on, off their nuts, each and every one of them, and when Andy Robinson looked out of the window and saw a load of people raving in a field, hands in the air, they decided they needed a bit more action. Later Coatesy, my bass roadie, told me what happened: they’d set off in search of this rave, absolutely off their faces, but urging each other on like intrepid explorers. After an hour’s walk, they finally got to the field – only to discover it was a load of Japanese doing early morning Tai Chi. They had to backtrack like drugged-up Keystone Kops, turn round and come straight back.
We got up later that day and I felt awful. I thought it was just a hangover but it turned out I’d contracted a virus that Western men are susceptible to in rural Japan (the same one Slim caught in 1985). Because I was so hungover my immune system was low, so I was the perfect host. I travelled with this flu-like virus to San Francisco (and thank God Becky was there to look after me, otherwise I think I would have died, for sure). As it was, I lost two stone in four days, just sweating it out. I couldn’t get warm, that was the thing. Added to that, I was scared I wasn’t going to be able to play.
After checking into the hotel I would go straight to bed, where I would be sweating that much the mattress was soaked, Bex would turn it over for me and when that soaked through she’d have to phone down for another one. The doctor wouldn’t give me anything for it. ‘There is nothing,’ they said.
I’d been really looking forward to our dates with Moby and Outkast, both of whom I loved; on top of which, I’ve never had to pull a gig in my life.
Who should come to the rescue? Billy Corgan. Being a man with a Jedi-like pharmaceutical knowledge, he knew of a flu medicine containing an upper that helps you pull through, Theraflu. Sure enough, he had some of this stuff; it did the trick and I played the gig. I was a mess in the dressing room beforehand though. I couldn’t stand up, and Tom Atencio took to grabbing me by the shirt and slapping me, trying to bring me round. Post-Theraflu I was running round like a nutter, only to collapse again in a heap straight after playing the gig.
I repaid Billy in true Peter Hook style (2001 version): by getting steaming drunk and taking the piss out of him the following night. We were out having a Chinese and I was at my big-mouthed drunken obnoxious best, so bad that even Sarge gave up on me that night. Everyone disowned me, in fact, and I spent the next two days making grovelling apologies for my behaviour and crying for my mum – one of my first alcoholic breakdowns, that was, the first of many.
The problem was that I was becoming a very gobby, physical drunk. I used to do a lot of exercise and weights so I could be a right handful when I was pissed. I was the one who used to start all the food fights.
Our comeback in 2000 was accompanied by a lot of invitations to awards ceremonies. Before, I could literally count the number I had been to on one hand (cue: ‘in our day we had to make our own entertainment’-like comments), but now there seemed to be one every week – NME, Q Awards, the Brits, FHM, Razzle, you name it – and if you were at an awards ceremony and a bread roll bounced off your head, you could bet your bottom dollar it was me who threw it. Bono, Bruce Springsteen, Iggy Pop, Cher – I’ve aimed bread rolls at them all.
Years later when I got sober I was at another awards do and this young lad comes up and introduces himself, saying, ‘You’ve been sober a while now, haven’t you?’
I said, ‘Yeah, about six or eight months or something.’
He went, ‘Well done, but we don’t half miss your food fights. I was sat next to Bono once when a bread roll hit him on the back of the head and when he turned round you gave him the Vs. I pissed myself. We miss moments like that.’
Ah well.
Anyway, on we went with the tour, and by the time we’d reached Seattle a dark cloud had descended. We were five gigs into a tour of more than thirty dates and Barney had had enough already. He was in the worst mood you could possibly imagine, not helped by the fact that Moby and, in particular, Outkast were going down a storm, while we were being met with young indifference and treated like dinosaurs. At Seattle one kid stood giving me the middle finger throughout our entire set. Meantime, on stage, Barney had a paddy at Roger Lyons, who was doing his autocue and operating the sequencers, and fired him during the gig – actually during the gig, over the microphone. I can’t remember what the problem was, but Barney said something well snarky, fired him, and then Roger came backstage and there was all kinds of screaming and shouting.
At the next gig Barney got so off his rocker that he didn’t even remember we’d all gone back on to play ‘New Dawn Fades’ with Moby – including Gillian and her sister.
By now I had the family on tour with me: Becky, Jessica, Jack and Heather. I was hardly what you’d call clean and sober but I was trying to keep a bit of a lid on it. We moved on to Cologne, Germany, where we supported Robbie Williams on one date of his ‘Weddings, Barmitzvahs and Stadiums Tour’. (We even got to see Robbie’s famous mobile laundry into the bargain, so it wasn’t all bad.)
We shared the same agent. Robbie needed something cool and we needed the exposure. I was still suffering from the virus at this point and the crowd showed absolutely no sympathy. Fuck me, they hated us, all 70,000 of them. Barney, in his infinite wisdom, decided to start slagging them off, introducing ‘Blue Monday’ by saying, ‘Here you are, here’s a good marching song, ’cos I heard you Germans like to march.’ Cue 70,000 people booing from start to finish.
We weren’t victimised though – JJ72, the other support, were treated exactly the same. This had not worked and Barney was waiting for Ian Huffan from X-Ray Agency backstage, and as soon as he appeared called him every name under the sun. Strange, as he had been the first to agree when we were told the fee for the show, £75,000 plus expenses.
Robbie came up to me afterwards, slapped me on the back and said, ‘Well done for getting through that.’
Barney’s mood stayed black. He’d taken again to complaining that my bass was too loud. We had talked about it, me saying, ‘Just let me know and I’ll turn it down. You don’t have to shout it over the mic.’
By the time of Barrowlands he’d forgotten and during ‘Temptation’ starting shouting, ‘Gerry, the bass is too loud, turn the bass down.’
This was something he was always doing – and probably still is now – ruining songs by yelling out instructions. If he wasn’t whistling, yelping or whooping then he was giving some poor technician a public dressing-down over the microphone. Didn’t matter what the song was – he seemed to delight in spoiling ‘Atmosphere’ by whooping over the top of it. I mean, who the fuck whoops during a song like ‘Atmosphere’? My mate said to me once, ‘Why does he scream, “COME ON!” during “Love Will Tear Us Apart”? It’s the only song that doesn’t need it.’ A backhanded compliment, Stefan, but noted. I know for a fact that no one has ever asked Barney why he does something as crass as that. Let’s hope he reads this book, eh?
Anyway, the thing was, by addressing Gerry, who as you’ll recall was our foldback guy, Barney was complaining about the sound mix on stage. In other words, only the sound he could hear, as we each had our own foldback. He felt my bass was too loud for him, and fair enough wanted it turned down. But what normal people do, if you want a change in your sound mix, is you signal to the foldback guy. You get his attention, you indicate a player and you point up or down to get the level changed. By doing it over the mic, Barney was doing it in such a way that you, the audience, could hear him – and there was no need to. He knew it didn’t affect the sound mix for the venue.
Basically, it’s a twat’s trick. It’s just for effect. Maybe it makes him feel better, maybe he wants you all to suffer like him and get some hate going for the big bad loud bass player. Maybe he thought it made him look like the big chief, not caring that it pisses off everybody in the process: the crew who think he’s being a condescending prick, and the audience who’d rather hear him sing than yell instructions at technicians.
I went over to him. Perhaps I should have done his trick and remonstrated with him publicly over the mic. But no, I went over to him. ‘Listen, if you’ve got a problem with the volume, signal to Gerry or tell me, don’t fucking mouth off over the mic, yeah?’ And then I started seething about it, storming off at the end of the gig. Then I went and did what every good rock’n’roller does and smashed up the dressing room.
Phil Cunningham arrived, and what do you know? He joined in, unveiling an appetite for destruction that was to rear its ugly head many times later on. If I recall, the whole entourage joined in smashing up the dressing room. Even Barney.
Oasis were on the next night. When they complained about the state of the dressing room they were told that Peter Hook had smashed it up. The lads were most impressed.
So I suppose you could say that relations between Barney and me began to deteriorate once again. Like I say, for much of the tour I’d had my family with me, so I’d kept the drinking and drugging to a minimum, but whether they weren’t there at Brixton or I got pissed anyway, I can’t remember. The fact was I was pissed and on the first night I stayed on stage long after the band had left, playing the intro to ‘Dreams Never End’ over and over again.
Of course, the crowd went bananas, thinking my intro heralded the return of the band and an encore of ‘Dreams Never End’, but after about six or seven minutes of this, I finished and then departed, leaving a bewildered audience behind me, me thinking I’d made a proper protest.
Then, on the second night, we were playing ‘Blue Monday’, the band walked off and I continued playing the outro. Only this time, as Barney walked past my amp, he unplugged me, the miserable bastard – funny though.
One of the good things about being back in New Order meant you got a lot of time off. Which, I have to say, at this point I was enjoying very much. I was reaping the only benefit of Barney’s mantra of ‘only doing one thing at once’.
At the end of the year we were offered the ‘Big Day Out’ or, as most groups called it, the ‘Big Day Off ’ because of the amount of downtime on this particular tour, looked after by our old friends Ken West and Vivien Lees.
Big Day Out had become a winning formula and was the biggest of all the Australian festivals. Only problem was, we had an unwilling participant. Now I know what you’re thinking – only Barney could turn down a great gig like that. But you’re wrong . . . on this particular occasion it was Steve, saying, ‘I don’t want to go away for three weeks.’ Me and Barney talked about it, what a great opportunity it was etc. Then Barney pipes up, ‘I know, why don’t we ask the drummer who did Electronic to do it, and me and you will go.’
Blow me down. It really was getting like dog eat dog around here. He’d be getting rid of me next. The management cleared it and negotiations were begun with said drummer, who was available. Then suddenly Steve changed his mind, turned out he could stand three weeks away after all.
The saga continued.