Interview — New Order (2024)

The 2021 ‘Manchester Homecoming’ marked nearly a whole decade since New Order decided to reconvene in 2011 after the 2007 departure of Peter Hook. This continuation had begun in October 2011, when New Order decided to play two concerts as benefits for Michael Shamberg’s medical fees – with the full line-up of Bernard Sumner on guitars and vocals, Stephen Morris on drums and percussion, Gillian Gilbert on synthesisers, Phil Cunningham on guitars, while adding new member Tom Chapman – from Bad Lieutenant – on bass.

2011…

Bernard Sumner: We did two gigs for Michael. It was a brave new world for us, because we didn't have Peter Hook in the band, and we didn't know how people would react. But we wanted to do it for Michael, because Michael Schamberg was the guy that produced all our videos, and when I say produced, he would find a director that was very ‘in’ with the film art world, and was very into left field cinema, and that was his job. He was also Factory New York, in the early days, and he became a close friend of the band, we used to hang out with him and go to clubs with him in New York. But he developed this mysterious illness, and nobody knows what it was to this day. He was filming in Lebanon, and came back and went into a coma for six weeks, and he was never really right again. It was a degenerative illness, and he got worse and worse. We did the gigs to try and pay for his hospital bills in Baltimore, where he'd moved from New York. We didn't know what was going to happen, but it was a good thing to do. It was great, we enjoyed it, and we knew straight away that it would work. And its been a slow ascent really, until now.

Stephen Morris: It was just a couple of shows, to get a bit of money in, and that could have been it.

Gillian Gilbert: But we got loads of offers in. It was up to me whether I wanted to carry on, really. It seemed quite pleasant at the time, so yeah, just went for it.

Phil Cunningham: It was an interesting prospect to get together to play some shows to help Michael out. I had been part of the band with Peter Hook from 2001-2007, but this time I got to work with Gillian for the first time which was refreshing as it also meant I could concentrate on playing guitar which is my main instrument – I had been covering a few keyboard parts in Gillian’s absence. It was also great to get Tom onboard… I knew he had a tough job to do but I was confident he could pull it off as I had worked with him before.

Tom Chapman: I remember walking onstage in Belgium with extreme trepidation, a mixed bag of nervousness and excitement. We weren’t sure how those shows were going to be received with me on bass duties. Both shows were great and the fans’ reception was fantastic! A return to form for New Order. Our second show in Paris meant a lot to me, I’d left France as a young musician full of aspiration: my love of various Mancunian bands and it’s music scene convinced me to move to Manchester in 1993. Here I was 18 years later walking on stage with the mighty New Order having come full circle! I’m grateful that Michael Shamberg asked us to play these shows to contribute towards his health bills, if it wasn’t for him I probably wouldn’t be part of New Order now, thank you Michael.

BS: The third gig was at the Troxy in East London (December 10th 2011), which wasn’t for Michael, but which we recorded. (It was released as a 2 x CD set, ‘Live at the Troxy’, in January 2012).

2012…

In March, New Order set off on a ten-day tour of Australia, with the highlight being their appearance at the Future Music Festival on 4th March 2012.

GG: We wanted to start small, ‘cos we didn't know people's reactions to Hooky going.

SM: The first time we realised how popular we still were was when somebody pulled out of The Future Music Festival in Australia, and we went from doing halls to doing a massive festival.

GG: And going around Sydney harbour on a party boat.

SM: And playing places that we'd never been to before. It got big, quite quickly, so we must have been doing something right. But it's always a surprise when you get a younger audience, rather than, middle aged is being kind. A funny thing happened, about the time of the gigs. A load of bands started up that were influenced by New Order, so we had Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem, and all of a sudden we were hip with the kids. Which is always good, but it was a bit of a surprise.

GG: When we were in Brazil later, there were loads of kids in the hotel reception in every town, and you felt like saying, “what are you doing here?” It was very odd.

After two homecoming shows at the 02 Apollo Manchester, New Order played Festival No. 6, at Portmeirion Village in North Wales (September 12th).

GG: I liked it when we all dressed up for the Prisoner Number Six festival. We had balloons…

SM: The stage effect was dry ice, and we were supposed to appear through this sort of mist. Unfortunately no-one had done the physics, and if you put something that's warm and rubbery, like this balloon was, and try and push it through something that's incredibly cold, which dry ice is, it tends to contract very rapidly. In fact, it just goes pop. So we pushed it, and suddenly – where has it gone? We did a few spectaculars like that, things didn't come off.

2013…

After touring America, Mexico and Canada in autumn 2012, New Order released ‘Lost Sirens’, a mooted follow-up album to 2005’s ‘Waiting for the Sirens’ Call’ that was shelved when Peter Hook left the group. The material was written and performed by Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Phil Cunningham and recorded in 2003-2004. Released in January 2013, it reached No.23 in the UK charts.

PC: It was good those songs finally got to see the light of day. They had been left on the shelf from recording sessions for ‘Waiting For the Sirens’ Call’. Ultimately, if you take the time to write and record music, you want people to hear it. Our original idea was we were going to make another record with those songs but that never happened for one reason or another! Although In hindsight, I kind of wish we had taken the strongest songs from WFTSC and ‘Lost Sirens’ and just put out one album.

On April 13 and 20, New Order played two shows at the Coachella Festival, Indio California, before travelling to Moscow and St. Petersburg for their first dates in Russia on June 28 and June 30 2013.

PC: I was excited to travel to Russia and play in Moscow & St. Petersburg as it was somewhere I had never been to before. It was worrying to hear we had sold hardly any tickets for the gigs. The tour manager put me at ease and said don’t worry that’s the way it is here people just walk up and pay on the door for shows as no one trusts the ticket companies who have been known to take peoples money without issuing tickets to them. Anyway I needn’t have worried, the gigs were a success.

Transmission 5, headlined and presented by New Order on the site of Jodrell Bank radio telescope. Design by Howard Wakefield.

On July 7 2013, New Order curated Transmission 5 live from Jodrell Bank, Cheshire on Sunday 7th July, headlining the show in the grounds of the iconic, and world famous Lovell radio telescope with special guests Johnny Marr, The Whip, Jake Evans and Hot Vestry.

SM: Jodrell Bank was going to be a fantastic laser spectacular. We spent ages writing all this music and getting it all electronically choreographed, and we got permission from Air Traffic Control to fire this massive laser up into the sky. It was only us that knew it was supposed to happen, and we had this big build up, and we pressed the button, and nothing happened. The projections onto the telescopes worked okay, but that was the big build-up to this massive bolt of laser-ness…

GG: Didn't you write some music specially?

SM: Yeah, I wrote a thing going over the Joy Division squiggles. It was the bit in between Temptation and Love Will Tear Us Apart.

PC: In some ways this was the perfect gig, if there is such a thing! It was a perfect summer evening in the Cheshire countryside and we had an amazing backdrop of the giant radio telescope behind us with some wonderful lights and lasers nicely put together by our lighting guy Andy Liddle.

New Order’s other dates this year included a US tour, taking in six cities – Austin, Atlanta, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Columbia and Boston – between July 19th and 30th, before climaxing at Lollapalooza in Chicago on August 2nd. Two days later, they finished the tour in Montreal, Quebec.

2014…

On March 12, Bernard Sumner, Phil Cunningham and Tom Chapman performed with Iggy Pop in the Tibet House Concert at Carnegie Hall, New York: they played Transmission, Love Will Tear Us Apart, and also played with Philip Glass on the debut live performance of Californian Grass. The collective also supported poet Mike Garry and his poem St. Anthony set to the music of Your Silent Face alongside the Scorchio String Quartet.

PC: This was a wonderful experience - to play alongside Bernard and Tom at this event. It’s quite a collaborative affair: we shared the stage with Iggy Pop, Philip Glass, and guys from the Patti Smith band. It’s a benefit gig that Philip Glass holds every year for the plight of the Tibetan people. It’s something I have been pleased to be involved with. Myself, Bernard and Tom have played it on subsequent years.

TC: I remember doing rehearsals for this show in NYC with Phil and Bernard prior to our gig at the Carnegie Hall. The idea was for all musicians invited to collaborate with each other for a couple of songs: we were going through Love Will Tear Us Apart when Iggy walked in the room and joined in singing the chorus with us. It sounded great. I immediately thought at the time that I had just taken part with Phil in a very special performance between Iggy and Bernard. A very memorable day!

In April, New Order set off for a South American tour, playing Lollapalooza dates at Santiago, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Sao Paolo. In July, they toured the USA and Canada, playing Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle, Vancouver, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

There were two major events in September. On the second, New Order signed with Mute Records.

GG: Mute was a bit like Factory, but a more successful Factory.

SM: Not quite as mad.

September 18th saw the publication of Bernard Sumner’s autobiography: ‘Chapter and Verse – New Order, Joy Division and Me’ published by Bantam Press.

BS: I wanted to write a book because I thought that it would be nice and relaxing, you know? We came off the tour, I wrote the book, did some more touring and then did the album. I didn't expect it to be so much work, but with it being an autobiography, you had to get so many details right, places and dates and events in the right order, as much as humanly possible. That was difficult, there was a lot of fact-checking. The other thing is trawling through things in your mind that you perhaps don't really want to remember. Childhood things that were unhappy, and obviously Ian dying, and talking about that in detail. But there had been a book written about me, by someone else, and I thought it was a load of cack really, and I got fed up with signing copies of it. So, I thought I'd write my own. Well that's it now, for me, I don't want to change profession. It's too much like hard work.

2015

On September 22, New Order released their first album of all new material following the departure of Peter Hook. Music Complete reached No.2 in the UK charts.

BS: Well, we're musicians, and what is it without creativity? If you don't write music, you're not a musician, you're a performer, in my mind. But I can understand why bands get to the point where they don't write music anymore, if they aren't getting on very well, or there's a problem in the studio, I can see why it happens.

But with ‘Music Complete’ we split off into three writing groups. There was Steve and Gillian, there was Phil and Tom, and then me, doing the more electronic tracks. I've been in situations where someone's programmed the computer, and you've got a twitchy guitarist wanting to lay down a lick, and bass players wanting to lay the foundation down, and drummers... But if you're writing electronic music, everyone is watching you operate a mouse. Obviously, they're bored out of their skulls, and the guy with the mouse is feeling guilty because he knows the others are really bored and f*cked off. But how else can you write electronic music?

So it was good that we split off into those groups, and we shared the tasks. I would go up to Steve's, find out what they'd done up there. And I'd go, “that's great as it is, give me that track and I'll go and have a go at a vocal line”. And we got Iggy involved. I'd met him a couple of times at the Tibet House concerts in New York, we were invited by Philip Glass. He does it every year, to raise money for Tibetan culture. Patti Smith does it every year, Iggy does it every year, and then different musicians. Patti Smith's band are available to play with everyone.

I sent Iggy the track of Stray Dog, and said, I've written this poem to it, would you be interested in having a go at it? He said, sure, I'll have a go. He laid down three vocals and sent them over, and I comped them up into one. I could have done it, but I just thought it would be great to have Iggy on a record. We're big fans, and he's a lot of fun. Really smiley, friendly, nice guy. He's great.

We'd not all worked together before, we'd not worked with Tom before, on a record. Well, I had, on Bad Lieutenant... but it was a different chemistry. You've got to be a bit worried about that, because a band has a DNA, and people buy into the DNA of that band, so it's a bit worrying when you change it. You've got to be careful and rein it in – I dunno, if you start making indie thrash music, it’s not really New Order. You've got to be cautious and put the brakes on occasionally.

But we know what we're doing, and it was a really well received album. Virtually every track on the album, we could play live, and I've got to add, we were educated on that album, playing live. We did quite a lot of gigs, in South America – Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru. Seeing what people get off on. Then we came back and started writing the album. It's very easy to fall into writing slow, introspective songs when you go in the studio, you're relaxed, and if you have a home studio, you're in a home environment, you have a glass of wine, watch something on TV, and you think, oh, I'll go in and write something in the studio – but it's sh*t when you play that live. The fast ones are harder to write. Everyone goes for the slow ones first, it's the natural groove to fall into, it's just the way your mind is clocked, when you're relaxed. Tom started falling into that a bit, and I just said, once we've written six fast ones, you can start to write stuff like that. But once we got about six fast ones in, it never happened, the slow stuff.

SM: If you're going to be in a band, you should have a go at writing some songs.

GG: And we were getting a new label, as well. We've known Daniel for years. It was new to Mute, and it was new to us, so it seemed like a new start. We'd all got our own studios, but we mainly practised here. We decided we were all going to contribute tunes, and see what we came up with.

SM: It was interesting, working with Phil and Tom...

GG: I'd never worked with them before.

SM: The electronic material is what people want. ‘Get Ready’ was supposed to be rocky, ‘Waiting for the Sirens' Call’, I don't know, let's write something like ‘Yessongs’, let's write loads of songs that we never get around to finishing. You should just stick to the good ones. ‘Lost Sirens’ was supposed to be another record, but it didn't quite work out like that, it became this collection of odds and sods, people called it outtakes, even though they weren't outtakes. But ‘Music Complete’ did very well, and it felt really fresh. Doing it was a bit like doing ‘Technique’, without the drugs, and the sunshine and the clubs.

GG: We could do what we wanted. I wasn't really keen on doing an album, so much work goes into it, and when you listen back to it, you think, is that it? All that work, and the toil and trauma.

SM: It was almost as basic as like Joy Division, let's just write a song, and play it. Not worry about making a record, just write a song and stick it in the set. What was the first one? Plastic? Then we wrote another song, and we stuck those in the set, and when you play a song in front of people, you get an idea of whether it's any good or not. When you're stuck in the studio on your own, you think everything's brilliant until you play it to somebody and you realise in the first sixteen bars that your work of genius is a heap of sh*t. It's called feedback, isn't it?

PC: We had played some great gigs since our return in 2011 with the new lineup. Making new music just felt like the logical next step. I was really excited to be working with Daniel Miller and Mute records. It seemed to be the perfect fit for New Order.

TC: Working on ‘Music Complete’ was a big learning curve for me as a songwriter and producer. It took a bit of time to get the rhythm right with the songwriting as we’d never worked together before, We’d been playing live for four years and it seemed to be the next natural step for the band to write an album. We didn’t do any jamming together, we all brought specific ideas that we all had and put them forward to the each other to work on. Working with Tom Rowland was a big plus. He was really good at making us try new musical directions. I was aware that critics could be dubious about this album not featuring New Order’s founding bass player, that gave me a kick up the arse to really work hard and put everything into it. It was important it sounded like me. I’m really pleased how it all came together in the end.

After the release of ‘Music Complete’, New Order set out out a European tour, with shows in Paris, Brussels, Stockholm and Berlin. Between November 16 and November 24, they also played five sold out shows in London, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Wolverhampton. Headlining the Clockenflap Festival in Hong Kong on November 29, they then flew to America to play a one off show at the Day For Night Festival, in Houston, Texas.

PC: One of the coldest gigs I have ever played. I had to wear a coat! It was freezing. Yes it was December, but even so it was unusual for it to get that cold in Houston. It was quite handy to get home from afterwards though. It is my wife’s home town and we were living in Houston at the time.

2016…

In March, New Order undertook a US tour, with sold out shows at Radio City Music Hall in New York, as well as in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and concluding at the Miami Fillmore Theatre on March 23. An April 23 show at the Royal Albert Hall in London was followed by the May release of remix album, ‘Complete Music’, which contained the extended versions (originally released on a limited edition vinyl box set) on CD for the first time. Between May and June, New Order played prestigious dates in Japan, and as well as Vivid Live 2016 at Sydney Opera House on June 2. After appearing at the Sonar Festival in Barcelona on June 18, New Order headlined Glastonbury’s Other Stage on June 25.

BS: I think a gig is a gig, whether you're playing to five hundred or five thousand, or fifty thousand people. We've always had a thing, going back to the days of Joy Division, that things work better, you make better music, if you don't think about it. The trick is to not think about it, and just do it. By doing that, you let go of yourself and let your subconscious take care of things. Don't get in the way of your instincts. Whether we're playing Glastonbury or a theatre gig, it's the same to me. I know that's peculiar, and it sounds pretty wrong, but that's just the way I am. The main thing for me is to have fun on stage with the band. If you're doing that, people would get off on that vibe as well. I think we played Glastonbury four times, and we headlined The Other Stage in 2016. We had a huge audience. Adele was on, and I think she forced all the rocky audience over to our stage.

TC: I’d never played Glastonbury before, it was always on my wish list of festivals to play!

The rest of 2016 was taken up with European dates in late June and early July, an appearance at Latitude Festival on July 17, Lollapalooza Festival, Berlin on September 10, and a four date South American tour – taking in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Santiago and Bogotá between November 29 and December 10.

2017…

On March 16, Bernard Sumner, Phil Cunningham and Phil Chapman performed at Tibet House US 30th Anniversary Benefit Concert, which also celebrated Philip Glass’s 80th Birthday. In April, New Order played Coachella for the third time.

PC: This is an interesting festival. A few years ago they decided to expand it so they have the same acts on over two weekends. So you do your gig then hang around for a week and do another gig the following weekend! An interesting concept. You get a strange sense of Deja vu. This time around we slotted in a gig in between the two weekends. Don’t get me wrong: California isn’t a bad place to hang around for a week but a week between gigs is a long time when you are supposedly out on tour!

In June and early July, New Order undertook a major collaboration with Liam Gillick for the Manchester International Festival, called ∑(No,12k,Lg,17Mif), and performed at Stage 1, Old Granada Studios, Manchester.

BS: That was really interesting. We played at the Manchester International Festival, and the concept was ’original modern’ – they wanted us to do something original, and also something modern, that was looking forwards, not looking backwards. so we had this idea of putting together an orchestra. We had played the Sydney Opera House - that was a highlight, we did four nights there, with an orchestra. So we thought about how we could get a twist on that, and a lot of our music is synthesised, so we got our music scored for twelve synthesisers, and have a synthesiser orchestra.

Liam Gillick came along and designed a set for us, a kind of interactive set that had louvres that opened and closed, as each player was playing the louvre would open, and when they weren't playing, the louvre would close and there would be projections on the louvres. It was technically very difficult and expensive to put on, and we did five nights in Manchester, I think, one or two nights in Turin, and two nights in Vienna, at the Arts Festival there. It was wonderful, it was great playing with young musicians, and I might just add that you couldn't do that now because of Brexit.

SM: That was interesting, a bit of a challenge, to say the least. It was good because it got you thinking about other songs. It's another one of Bernard's problems: ‘I don't know what people want to hear’. I think they want to hear New Order songs. So, here's some more New Order songs that we don't play very often. That worked out really well. We could do more of them. And it was good to not play Blue Monday. And we did a good Decades. That started out with the Sydney Opera House thing. I must admit I was very skeptical about playing Sydney Opera House and having an orchestra. It's kind of like Deep Purple. It could go one of two ways, and we lucked out, I think. The version of Decades started out as part of that. It would have been good to do more of those shows, it was a good contrast to what we would normally do, visually and sonically different. But it was like Spinal Tap, and the production was so big, we couldn't really do any more, which was a shame. Maybe we'll think of a cut-price way of doing it. Again, it was working with young people with ideas. They were brilliant. Really very good musicians, and us!

TC: I loved the process of picking up songs for the set list for the MIF concerts, we all picked four songs from each New Order album, in chronological order. I think the list was so big, it took us a couple of weeks to narrow it down to the final one. We deliberately stayed away from playing the hits and picked some obscure songs. That went down really well with the fans at the shows.

Working with the synths orchestra was great: we recruited 12 brilliant musicians from the Royal Northern College of Music and Joe Dudell was in charge of conducting it. Liam Gillick came on board to design Bernard’s idea of the boxes on stage.

In September, New Order travelled to America to play at Riot Fest, Chicago, before playing the Hollywood Bowl on September 18.

2018…

After more festival dates in America – August 25-26: InCuya Music Festival, Cleveland Ohio, September 29-30: Music Tastes Good Festival, Los Angeles, California – New Order played a major UK show at Alexandra Palace in London on November 9.

BS: That was a great gig, and there was a howling storm outside. It might have been called Storm Barney, actually. But it was a fantastic gig. The only downside of it was when I came back on the train the next day, and I was surrounded by New Order fans on the train. Three or four of them sat around me, saying, this must be your worst nightmare, and I said, yeah, it is. But there was nowhere else for them to sit. They didn't ask any New Order questions, and we proceeded to get pissed on the way back up to Manchester, it was a good laugh, actually.

SM: It was good, Alexandra Palace, it was a massive show.

TC: The gig was filmed by Mike Christie who we worked with for the Decades documentary. I don’t think there had been a live filmed performance of New Order since the Glasgow one in 2005.

2019…

On May 16, there was the publication by Little Brown of the best-selling book by Stephen Morris, ‘Record Play Pause: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist: The Joy Division Years: Volume 1’. The summer included festival appearances at Rock Werchter, Rotselaar, Belgium, Bluedot Festival at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, Low Festival in Alicante, Spain and the Lowlands Festival in Biddinghuizen, Netherlands. On July 12, the recording of ‘∑(No,12k,Lg,17Mif) New Order + Liam Gillick: So it goes.. (Live at MIF)’ was released on CD and LP. During the first half of October, New Order set out on a European tour, taking in the Czech Republic, Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

2020…

Between January 14-18, New Order had a residency for four nights at The Fillmore, Miami Beach. They had already played there almost exactly a year previously. On one the four nights, they performed ∑(No,5m,20Mia) a special upfront performance, without synth orchestra and art installation, of the unique collection of songs and arrangements that made their acclaimed Manchester International Festival appearance such a huge success.

PC: These gigs were fun. It’s a good feeling setting up shop and doing a little residency. No travelling having to deal with airports or changing hotels. You’re stationary and you just get to turn up and play. You also get to enjoy the city you’re in more as you have more time to explore it. I always wondered what it would be like to do a residency in Vegas… would probably drive you mad after a while. This is as close as we got to that anyway! We did a similar thing in Sydney back in 2016. We played 4 nights at Sydney opera house with an orchestra.

On September 8, New Order released a standalone single, Be A Rebel. The video was directed by Spanish director NYSU, who had previously worked with the group on the video for Restless.

BS: It was the last track that came in for ‘Music Complete’, the last track that I worked on vocals on, but we had so many ideas, it didn't really make it onto the record. It literally came about while ‘Music Complete’ was being mixed. Toward the end of the mixing, I brought it in, and said, I've finished this one, what does everyone think? People liked it, but the album was already chock full of music, so we just left it on the shelf. I always felt that the song had potential, and when the lockdown came, I finished it off.

It was difficult, because I didn't have an engineer here, so I had to do it myself. Keyboard programming, and then the engineering, I ended up chasing my tail quite a few times, going around in circles. Then I decided to do a remix of the original, called the Renegade Mix, and Steve did a remix as well, called the T-34 Mix, and it came about in the lockdown ‘cos I wanted to do something. I always thought it had potential, and I thought it was radio friendly, and it turned out to be our best received track on radio since about 1991, something like that. So it did very well.

SM: That was a peculiar one. How to write a song – or finish a song, really, because it was started at the end of ‘Music Complete’, and it never got finished. It was funny writing a song, much like we're doing this now, by remote control, where you don't really get any feedback from people, and then you try and explain what you want, what your thoughts are, and it just doesn't work. If you're in the same room you can just look at them and go [sucks teeth] and everybody knows, but putting it into words and typing it is very unsatisfactory. But it's the way of the world, at the minute. It could be worse. At least we got something out of it. It makes you appreciate the togetherness thing of it, being left on your own and stewing, stuff like that. You do need another person, at least one other person, much like Rob. If we'd been in a room with Rob, we could have sorted it out in a few weeks. As it was, it just went on, and on, and on.

TC: It’s been a strange two years since our last show in Melbourne where everything came to a halt for us. Being in lockdown made it difficult for us to work together especially on Be a Rebel. We all had to work individually and send each other ideas of what we’d done: normally you would just be in the same room and the process would be much faster and easier. There was a lot of email exchanges to try and get the ideas across, but we got there in the end.

On September 18, there was the release of the Autumn/Winter '20 adidas Spezial campaign, with a collaborative capsule range designed with New Order.

BS: We were approached by Gary Aspden, who's got his own line with adidas, called Spezial, and he's a mad New Order fan, and he asked if I wanted to do something collaborative with him, with adidas. And once again, it was like, f*cking hell, can I design clothes, or shoes? If we're going to do something like that, it's got to be totally hands-on. So we went over to Germany, to Nuremberg, two or three times, and to Herzogenaurach, where the worldwide headquarters are, which is an amazing complex.

I worked with Warren Jackson, who does our visuals now, onstage visuals and artwork, and we designed a tracksuit, a pair of trainers, a jacket which was very important, a t-shirt. A sports outfit, really. It was interesting. You couldn't start from scratch. Say you wanted to make a completely new pair of trainers - you would have to make the machine presses to make them, and that would cost two hundred grand, so we had to use existing templates and put our own design on. We worked with a really good international team, people from Germany, Italy, Spain, France, America, two British people, it was a perfect example of an pan-European workplace. It was a great experience. We had a few arguments about stuff, you know? A bit like being in a band, really...

On December 3, the second volume of Stephen Morris’ memoir, ‘Fast Forward: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist Volume 2’, was published by Little Brown.

SM: People seem to have liked the books, which is a good sign, I think. It's something I'd like to do a bit more of. I enjoyed the writing bit, which is the easy bit: it's the putting it all together and shoving it out is hard work.

2021

On May 7, ‘Education Entertainment Recreation (Live at Alexandra Palace)’ was released as a live album and concert film.

PC: When I eventually got to sit down and watch the Ally Pally gig from 2018, I must say it took me a back a little. Mike Christie did a great job making the film. It made me realise how we have evolved over the last decade to become a really top band. With the help of the great crew and creatives we have onboard it has helped us realise our potential. It made me proud to be part of the New Order family.

On September 10, New Order played Heaton Park, Manchester, to a capacity crowd of 35,000.

BS: We were going on tour, co-headlining with the Pet Shop Boys, and that tour should have happened in September 2020, and because of COVID, we had to postpone it to late September 2021, but by that time we wouldn’t have played for a year and a half, so the idea of the Heaton Park gig was as a warm-up for the North American tour. We play some pretty big gigs on the tour, we sold out two nights at Madison Square Gardens, we sold out two nights and we've been asked to do a third at the Hollywood Bowl. Normally, I wouldn't have done Heaton Park if we'd been playing previously. I'm anti- warm-up gigs. So we put it in as a warm-up, and it sold out!

SM: We've done the gig in Heaton Park in Manchester. There's the tour with the Pet Shop Boys to come... you don't know what's going to happen, gig-wise. Working on new things is challenging. That's where you get into the whole lockdown mental health thing. It drives you insidiously mad. You don't realise the effects of being stuck in the same place for months, literally not going out, has on you. You do see a lot of angry people, I've noticed. Everybody seems to be very annoyed.

BS: New Order was always about looking ahead, not looking back. I don't want to get stuck in the past. Even the last box set (‘Power Corruption and Lies’), I didn't want to do any interviews for it, I've trawled over and over that stuff. I'm a creative person, and creativity is about the future. If you're just about the past, it's not creative, is it? It's reflective, but not creative. I'm just not that kind of person, the past is gone, and once it's gone, it's gone. The exciting thing is what's going to happen next…