Picture the scene: me with my spaniel, Mia, hiding in the bushes in the park (like an old perv) opposite Brasingamens in Alderley Edge.
Brasingamens was a bar and restaurant that later changed its name to Panacea and then got burned down in a door-security dispute, about two years ago. But that day, in 2002, it was the scene of a New Order meeting. The group were going to talk about reconvening to write a new album. However, Barney and I had decided that if Gillian was involved we were going to leave the band.
We informed Rebecca and Andy and the blank looks on their faces told us all we needed to know: that they were completely out of their depth. As I lived nearer, the idea was that I’d hide in the bushes, wait to see if Steve turned up with Gillian and then either warn Barney off or give him the all-clear.
In the event, Steve turned up alone, we all went into the meeting and decided to start writing again.
You never learn, do you?
We decamped to the farmhouse and started getting ideas together. Musically, we reverted back to how we did it for Joy Division, with me, Steve and Barney jamming and refining ideas. After a couple of months we got some good ones together, about seven, and then Barney unilaterally decided he was going home to write lyrics and vocal melodies. That meant me and Steve were surplus to requirements. This wasn’t too bad and it certainly got all your DIY done, but it didn’t bode well for how long the project was going to take.
Months later, Steve and I were still twiddling our thumbs so I suggested bringing in Phil to help. Our destructive ex-Marillion mate had been a boon on tour, so why not try him out in the studio?
In he came, and for a while, we were motoring. Jamming as a three-piece allowed us to develop even more song ideas. However, one weird thing I noticed was that Steve was reluctant to elaborate on his ideas. I reckoned it was because Barney would just change everything anyway and Steve thought it wasn’t worth the effort. I must add, though, that as soon as Steve got in with the producer he was happy to do anything and suggested lots of ideas.
This incarnation of the group worked decent hours, ten until six. I’d leave the Farm, buy my two bottles of wine from the village shop in Prestbury, go home, cane the wine, racing Becky to get the most, and return in the morning.
I was ringing up Barney, going, ‘We’ve got loads of ideas here, mate.’ And he was saying, ‘Great. This is more like it.’
Knowing Barney, he was just sat around watching the History Channel, drinking tea and eating chicken legs and chocolate digestives, but it was nice to hear.
Having Phil onboard as an extra player really helped. I was delighted. Being this prolific was fantastic and my head was filled with thoughts of double LPs.
At this point we had managed to turn out around eighteen strong ‘A’ ideas and another thirteen ‘B’ ones. Then a worried-looking Andy Robinson came in. He said Barney was getting irate about so many ideas, getting swamped, and we must stop. We had enough to make two albums already.
Oh dear. Luckily we had been asked by Pete Saville to contribute some music for an exhibition he was doing. He wanted a thirty-minute piece of music to play, half an hour being the length of time he reckoned that a person would need to go round his exhibition at London’s Design Museum.
Barney refused, quite rightly saying he had enough to do. Me, Phil and Steve were delighted to do it alone, with Steve even writing the drums for it.
There are two main reasons that Waiting for the Sirens’ Call is a more guitar-based album than Get Ready. One is the writing process using Phil, and the other is because I stood my ground. There’s one other reason why, despite the guitars, it still sounds weak, but we’ll get to that later.
Still, it took a long time and we were into 2003 before we knew it and we felt it was time to start recording proper. Our A&R guy at Warners was a bloke called Paul Brown, who was a bit vague but nice with it. Him and Barney came up with an idea to use a number of different producers, matching the producer to the style of the track. Yours truly felt the band should produce the album – I was envisaging all kinds of problems with not just one but a series of different producers clogging up the place – and I was dead right, it turned out to be a nightmare. It didn’t work at all.
Back into the wonderful privileged world of Real World (still nothing like the real world) I took my drinking to the next level. The six o’clock cocktail had crept forward to four, sometimes three. I had a lot of time on my hands, rattling around Real World, getting more and more frustrated with the producers and more and more pissed.
The first producer was Tore Johansson. He came and went. He had actually managed to lose the bass I had spent days doing on ‘Sugarcane’, something Barney took great delight in throwing in my face in his book, saying I never finished it. In fact, I never had the opportunity to redo it after the split in 2007. Tore still got a credit on Lost Sirens, though.
Steve Osborne was next to come and go. He didn’t get a credit at all, even though Barney brought him back in later for another attempt. As he left the second time he said to me, ‘I must be the only producer in the history of music to be sacked off the same session twice.’ I hugged him goodbye.
Then came John Leckie. They were dropping like flies. In my opinion most of them were not as good producers as we were; we were definitely selling ourselves short. After a few drinks I’d corner Barney and suggest we went back to our old way of working, and beg him to stop listening to the record company. It was always the same answer: ‘I don’t want to argue with you, Hooky. No.’
In the end we decided to give more of the tracks to Stephen Street and produce some ourselves with Jim Spencer, Barney’s engineer from Electronic. I was never impressed with Jim’s ability and, fuelled mainly by the booze, christened him ‘cloth ears’, giving him a hard time whenever I could. I apologise, Jim. It’s not a sin to have different ideas, after all. It does boil down to taste.
I think I was taking my frustration out where and when I could, again, sorry. We put him down as producer on some tracks to make amends.
Stephen Street used an engineer called Cenzo Townshend, who was excellent. They would turn out to be a great team. Stephen had a very good manner and was easy to work with and for the recording of his songs arranged a recording set-up to be installed in the actress Jane Seymour’s house near Bath.
The set-up was in the main house with accommodation scattered between the old house, which was quite spooky, and a newer extension. Robbie Williams and many others had recorded there before us. The rest of the producers would use Real World for their recording, meaning that at one point we were running two of the country’s most expensive studios simultaneously.
We started the sessions in Bath with the best intentions but soon crept back to the old way of working, with Barney going on until all hours. I’d go to bed pissed about 11 p.m., closely followed by Steve. At least we could work with Stephen and Cenzo early in the morning with Nosferatu surfacing around lunchtime. Things went quite well for a while, until Barney went on holiday.
Coming back newly inspired, he decided he wanted to write some more tracks from scratch on the computer. I brought up his statement about us having enough songs, only to be met by a blank look. Now, Barney had an equation for writing and recording. He reckoned that each track took a month from start to finish, which for New Order wasn’t far wrong. So by adding three more he was lengthening the session by another three months at least.
‘So?’ he said.
That was it. As we know, readers, it’s not do as I do, it’s do as I say. And if you’re wondering which three songs I’m talking about:
1. ‘I Told You So’
2. ‘Scott Walker’, which became ‘Recoil’
3. I’ve Got a Feeling’
Back in Real World it was still chaos. Barney enlisted even more help, bringing in Mac Quayle (another Electronic find) from New York, to re-program ‘Guilt Is a Useless Emotion’ and ‘Shake It Up’. The studio was full of people I hardly knew. The record company would come down and tell us they didn’t like where it was going and go off to think of someone else to bring in. It was really going from the sublime to the ridiculous.
But against all the odds we got all the songs finished and adjourned to Olympic Studios in Barnes, to do our mixing or await mixes from the various producers. At last the end was in sight. It was summer 2003.
Over the years, Rebecca and Andy were coming in with offers of tours for all round the world, and I was busting for the group to take a break and earn a bit of money, but all the way through New (New) Order or New Order II, Barney’s mantra that you can’t do two things at once stuck. For some reason it was OK to take a holiday for a few weeks and make an album, but you can’t gig once or go on tour for a week and make an album.
Besides, he still loved being in the studio. For most bands it’s a case of wanting to get the recording done, because it’s so bloody expensive and they can’t wait to get out of there and gig. I felt that for Barney it was a case of, ‘Let’s string this out for as long as we can, so we don’t have to gig.’ It used to drive me mad, and it certainly drove me to drink.
Luckily, salvation arrived in the form of a second career. Thanks to the advice of Mani, I was going to become a DJ.