Bernard Sumner: ‘If you’re a working class white male, you’re a bit forgotten about’
The Joy Division guitarist and New Order frontman on the necessity of creative escape and the promise of punk.
Bernard Sumner can’t remember much about the first time New Order toured Australia in 1982 with the punk poet John Cooper Clarke, save for “a few horrible hangovers”.
By 1985, however, the haze parts just enough for Sumner to recall an incident at The East Leagues Club in Queensland. A venue that, for context, had tolerated a rabid Iggy Pop, The Pogues held upright by the grace of Guinness, and The Cramps frontman Lux Interior performing in little more than stilettos and a leather G-string – yet, drew the line at New Order’s sound guy, Ozzy. “The barman took offence because he was wearing shorts, so they kicked him out,” Sumner recalls.
What does one do when their sound guy has been ejected for indecent exposure? Improvise. “He got some of the other roadies to steal bar mats and got loads of safety pins and made a pair of trousers out of them.” Did he get in? “He did. He could be a bit of a rough guy, and if they had said no, he would’ve gone for a different method,if you know what I mean.”
You get the picture – or perhaps you don’t. New Order has long been embalmed in the language of doom and gloom, heirs to Joy Division’s despair turned electronic aesthetes cloaked in Peter Saville’s austere album sleeves. But the reality – that they were rowdy 20-somethings determined to have as much fun as their bodies would allow – often gets lost in the myth. “We weren’t careerists, we didn’t give a f..k about being famous. We just wanted to have a good time all the time,” Sumner chirps.
Purposefully or not, New Order have made a four-decade career out of music. One that will bring them back to Australia this month for a national tour that will include two sold-out shows at the Sydney Opera House forecourt.
Sumner is speaking to Review over Zoom from a hotel room in Kyoto. He looks, as ever, like Bernard Sumner: at 69 he’s still sporting the same haircut he’s had all his life – short back and sides, a little longer on the top – but now with thick-rimmed reading glasses that lend him an air of respectability.
The Joy Division guitarist turned reluctant New Order frontman insists he’s not much of a performer. “At heart I’m more of a creative person. But the way things have changed in music, you have to be more of a performer.”
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He’s right in saying things have changed. The music industry he came of age in during the late 1970s is a world away from what it’s like now. It was simpler. You could build a career out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Joy Division’s frontman Ian Curtis famously parked himself at Factory Records headquarters, trying to foist demos on the label’s impresario Tony Wilson.
Had they got their start now, when it’s all but impossible for smaller, independent bands – especially working class ones – to survive financially, it’s hard to say if they would have made it. Does that thought bother Sumner? “It’s a disaster,” he says. “I don’t see any way for a band that hasn’t got a purely image-based persona to make it.”
“A lot of people that are making it seem to be pop princesses, and if you look them up, they were on Disney, which is peculiar.” He could be referring to any number of them – Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, or, spin the time-wheel back a decade to Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez. Even Yungblud, the self-styled punk, got his start in the House of Mouse.
“If you’re a working-class male, dare I say white male, you’re a bit forgotten about,” Sumner says.
“Music is a great outlet for people to escape. If you’re not academic or good at maths or sciences, or you don’t want to jump through the hurdles they want you to jump through …. It’s important that people can escape. Not everyone can work at nine-to-five and knuckle under, get a house, have kids, get a car, get on the treadmill. Some people can’t live a normal life. I started off doing it, but I felt like it was a career of death.”
Sumner grew up in Salford, outside Manchester, with a single mum who had cerebral palsy. His first job out of school was at the Salford Town Hall, sticking down envelopes and sending rate bills (“an early death”). A brief escape came in the form of a job at Stop Frame, a Manchester animation company that made children’s shows. “It was great, but it wasn’t enough,” he says.
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Then came 1976 and the now-mythologised Sex Pistols gig at Lesser Free Trade Hall. Thousands have claimed to have been there, only a handful actually were, and those who were went on to form the most influential bands of the 20th century: Sumner, Curtis, and Peter Hook of Joy Division, Morrissey of The Smiths, Mark E. Smith of The Fall and Billy Duffy of The Cult.
“Punk came along and suddenly music seemed exciting, and more importantly, possible,” Sumner says. “Punk was so DIY. If the Pistols could do it … not that they were crap…,” he trails off. “All you needed was three chords and a good imagination, you don’t need to be a virtuoso.”
Three years later, Joy Division released Unknown Pleasures, one of the most enduring records of all time. But more than that, one that captures the spirit of its city. Manchester in 1979 was clapped-out and on the brink of redevelopment. The Winter of Discontent had left bins overflowing and the air putrid; Fordism was dead, and Thatcher was in.
Today, cities are shinier, more generic: all glass towers, Zara, and Starbucks. What happens to music when everything starts to look and feel the same? “I’ve started calling Manchester ‘Mankhattan’ because it looks so different,” Sumner jokes. “But I’ve got to be honest, it’s nicer now than it was back when we made the album.”
He says the band didn’t set out to capture the sound of Manchester, but also admits that “if we’d lived somewhere else, the music wouldn’t have sounded like that”.
“It was all unintentional – we never really interacted much in the studio. Not studio, my god! It was a crap rehearsal room, a cold, old factory. It was derelict. We had one little electric radiator that we huddled around. So maybe unintentionally we captured a bit of that, and a bit of the industrial decay because we were saturated by it – it was all around us.”
The role in all this of their provocateur producer Martin Hannett – who turned the heating down so low the band members could see their breath – cannot be underestimated. “We were told, ‘he’s a genius, leave it to him’,” says Sumner. “We were naive.”
“When I first heard the album, I thought, ‘Hmm … this sounds a bit wimpy.’ Live, we were much more aggressive – we’d come out of the punk movement, so the music had a lot more bite. But Martin toned it down, made it ethereal. It worked, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we hadn’t captured the raw power of our sound.”
Sumner is now confident in calling the shots. He even good-naturedly knocks a Quincy Jones’ remix of the New Order hit Blue Monday. ‘“Some songs just can’t be improved upon. They capture a moment in time, and you can’t remix a moment in time,” he says.
Jones, the producer titan who died in November last year, was the boss of New Order’s first major record label, Qwest Records. It was just them and Frank Sinatra at the time. Sumner remembers Jones as “a really nice guy, working class like us, and he got us.” “We went to his house for dinner, and he took us to his basement and said, ‘this is my space, my den.’ He had a pool table down there. Then he goes, ‘listen to this – Marlon Brando called me last night and left a message’. He played the tape, and it was Marlon saying, “Hey, Quincy, it’s Marlon. I’ve been thinking about life and its purpose,” and then he went off on this long, rambling diatribe. Quincy said, ‘It goes on for two hours!’
Growing up in Manchester, Scrappiness was a necessity. “It was a rough place, bleak and stark,” Sumner says. “Each instrument captured what had been baked by our life experiences, which weren’t very nice.” His first Gibson guitar, purchased for Unknown Pleasures, came at the cost of a two-hour train ride to Doncaster because it was five pounds cheaper there than in Manchester. It would wind up getting nicked in New York, during New Order’s first US tour in 1981 — one year after they were meant to debut as Joy Division, before Curtis’s suicide at the age of 23.
The remaining members regrouped and rebranded, wrote a handful of songs and polished up the Joy Division track Ceremony to head to New Jersey to do a spot of recording.
“All the equipment was put in the van and Tony Wilson came knocking on the door, grinning,” Sumner recalls. “I said, ‘What are you laughing at?’ and he said, ‘it’s wonderful, wonderful.’ I said, ‘what’s wonderful?’ and he said, ‘it’s the perfect ending to Joy Division. You’ve just had all your equipment stolen’.”
They found out later it was stolen by a sect called the Roving Tribe of Israel, and that their insurance wouldn’t cover it. “Like, can things get any worse? We just lost our singer, $3000 worth of equipment was stolen. It wasn’t wonderful,” he says, dryly.
In this week’s Review cover story, Andrew McMillen dissects the way artificial intelligence has wormed its way into music production.
For those who’ve spent a little too long in the shadow of Joy Division’s legacy, the story of Ceremony is well-known: a version of the track with Ian Curtis’s vocals still exists. But would Sumner entertain the idea of using AI, much like The Beatles did in 2023 with John Lennon’s voice on Now and Then, to resurrect Curtis’s presence on the track? “What The Beatles did was great, but Ceremony is a shocking recording,” he says. “We were broke, using a cassette player that probably cost 15 quid. Even if they extracted his voice, the quality would be terrible.” Prognosis: negative, then.
So, what’s next for New Order? “I haven’t done a lot of recording for quite a while, which is something I hope to rectify,” Sumner says.
The band’s last record, Music Complete, was released a decade ago. “It’s a lot of work making an album, if you’ve not written for a long time you forget how to do it.”
New Orderis touring Australia until Saturday, March 15.
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