The Blue Monday Diaries E-Book

Michael Butterworth

• Herausgeber: Plexus Publishing Ltd.
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

A firsthand account of the studio sessions for the fastest selling 12" single ever, 'Blue Monday', New Order's classic dance track, and Power, Corruption and Lies, their acclaimed second album. Compiled from the diary/journals of Michael Butterworth, the trusted friend of New Order who lived and worked with the band throughout the recording sessions. Three decades on, author Michael Butterworth breaks the silence to reveal exactly what went into the recording of this classic track, as well as the Power, Corruption and Lies album. Drawn from Butterworth's meticulous journal entries, Blue Monday provides a uniquely personal insight into the creative personalities of the band.

Leseprobe

Plexus, London

For Sara

‘Blue Monday’ 12”, Factory Records (FACT73), 1983. Design: Peter Saville and Brett Wickens.

    THE PLAYERS    

Gillian Gilbert – keyboards, synthesisers and guitars

Peter Hook – bass and vocals

Stephen Morris – drums, electronic drums, keyboards and synthesisers

Bernard Sumner – vocals, guitars, keyboards and synthesisers

Rob Gretton (RIP, 15 January 1953–15 May 1999)

– manager Joy Division/New Order, 1978–99

‘Blue Monday’ 12”, Quincy Jones and John Potoker remix, Qwest Records, 1988.

    CONTENTS    

FOREWORD

BEGINNINGS

INTRODUCTION

THE DIARY

‘DUB IT UP!’

‘WE WERE LIKE THE GUINEA PIGS’

SUITE 16

SCIENCE FICTION

APPENDIX 1 – ‘BLUE MONDAY’: A FACT SHEET

APPENDIX 2 – OVERFLOW

CHAPTER NOTES

Power, Corruption & Lies, Factory Records (FACT75), 1983. Design: Peter Saville and Brett Wickens.

    FOREWORD    

T his book is a memoir of hanging out with New Order at Britannia Row studio while they were recording Power, Corruption & Lies and ‘Blue Monday’. The band was looking for a new musical direction after the tragic death of Ian Curtis, the singer who fronted them while they were still known as Joy Division. Although it was not evident to anyone at the time, the songs recorded at these sessions proved to be their defining moment. What I learned there about ‘Blue Monday’ – and what I have learned since – form equally strong vectors in my book.

As much as it is these things, it is also a contextual story. It tells, through my personal family connections and through Savoy Books, the publishing house I run in Manchester with my business partner David Britton, how I came to be aware of the nascent Factory Records and early Joy Division; how, by a fortunate fluke, I happened to hear their music playing through my neighbour’s floor from the room above me, where a film of their work was being made; how curiosity – the need to learn more – set me on this trail; and how events eventually lead to me becoming a fly on the wall at Britannia Row.

The book is in three main parts. The contextual background is told at the front of the book in my introduction. It is a ‘tale of two cities’, drawing material from two influential cultural entities that existed side by side in Manchester during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s – Factory Records/Joy Division/New Order, with its highly visible ripples spreading across the globe, of which I was an observer; and my company Savoy Books/Records, a much less visible cultural presence in Manchester that Tony Wilson respectfully mentioned in his introductory addresses to delegates for In the City, the international music symposium he founded with his partner Yvette Livesey.

Our paths crossed in two significant ways; first when the then schoolboy Stephen Morris discovered the bookshops run by Savoy and then, more directly, through my personal life. Both encounters were brought about by chance, the kind of happy accident that can occur when you are committed to your interests; when, through those, you suddenly find yourself thrown in the orbits of other adventurers like yourself, your interests grow and take unexpected turns.

My Introduction, therefore, is divided into two halves in order to reflect these dual pathways. The first scene-setting part reveals a hitherto unsung facet of the Manchester music scene – of which New Order were a part. The second tells of my encounter with Joy Division at my home in Altrincham. I have tried to keep the first half, Savoy’s story, to a minimum, but the fact is that through our bookshops we played more than a passing part in the stories of early Factory, Joy Division, New Order and therefore the creation of ‘Blue Monday’. We were a crucial resource.

My diary (kept in 1982, thirty-three years ago) comes next and occupies the central section of my book. Even so, it is incomplete, because personal circumstances meant that I had to leave the studio before the mixing stage of recording took place.

In the first of my concluding sections, ‘Dub It Up!’, dedicated to New Order’s then manager, the late Rob Gretton, I attempt to reconstruct what I missed at the mixing stage. In the section that follows, ‘We Were Like the Guinea Pigs’, I tell the story of how ‘Blue Monday’ was written, the underwhelming reaction at Factory’s nightclub the Haçienda when a white-label promotional recording of the track was first dropped there and the problems of its live performance. In the third concluding section, Suite 16, I tell a related story – of how my time with New Order led to Savoy Books starting its own recording wing at Hooky’s Suite 16 recording studio, which eventually resulted in David and I recording a version of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and three versions of ‘Blue Monday’. In the fourth and final part, Science Fiction, I attempt to express what ‘Blue Monday’ and Power, Corruption & Lies mean to me personally, and why I believe they are such special pieces of music.

There are two appendices: Basic Facts about ‘Blue Monday’ and Overflow, containing information that is secondary or peripheral to the book but that may still be of interest to the reader.

At my request I was invited by all the members of New Order, including Rob, to document the recordings and be with them while the recordings took place – even to stay with them in the flat they rented for the purpose in Kensington. Our meeting to discuss my proposal is covered in Beginnings, the piece that follows after this Foreword. At this meeting, no stipulations were made beyond (at my own insistence) the fact that I would not use a tape recorder or camera. I took only notebooks and a pen.

I set out to record what happened, as it happened. But as much as it is a diary of moment-to-moment ‘ordinariness’, it is also a regular story of rock’n’roll (and perhaps the two weren’t all that different), of which I had the privilege to record only a tiny portion. It is a record of the wilder, more impetuous side of the original members of New Order – their hedonism and penchant for mischief and satire – and, indeed, of myself and the other people who appear within this story.

Re-reading these pages it occurs to me that a discrepancy exists between the people all of us are now and the kind of people we were back then, when we were mostly in our twenties. I have included these more candid aspects as a sociological record and also because without them the book loses its very human element. Very soon, if not even then, we had mortgages to worry about, families to raise. Time passes, concerns change, people change. Once young bloods, some of us now queue up to receive our knight- and damehoods.

‘Blue Monday’, the leitmotif of this memoir, became a big part of my life. Here is my story of it.

From left to right: Stephen Morris, Peter Hook, Gillian Gilbert and Bernard Sumner, 7 July 1983 at the Paradise Garage, New York. Stateside clubs like this one and Danceteria are what inspired ‘Blue Monday’ and Factory’s own Haçienda, leading to the rise of the ‘Madchester’ scene.

    BEGINNINGS    

When I thought of writing about New Order at Britannia Row it was a simple question of okaying it with the band. I knew of their disdain for the usual, unsolicited approaches of journalists. This was my feeling also and from the start I made it clear that no tape recorder would be present. I would bring notepads and pens, and keep a daily minute-to-minute diary. To explain this, I phoned Rob, their manager. We all met one windy day in spring or early summer 1982 over lunch at the Unicorn, a regular’s watering hole on Church Street in Manchester city centre, across the road from the busy fruit and vegetables barrows (which are now gone). Although I didn’t realise it at the time, and the subject never came up, the band were in the throes of writing ‘Blue Monday’. To allay crowd disappointment at their refusal to do encores, they were intending to produce a ‘machine’ track that could be left playing at the end of performances. But despite ‘Blue Monday’ being conceived in this functional way, once they started making the song, their perceptions of what it might be changed.

‘New Order,’ my first diary notes begin:

. . . who have the reputation of treating the capricious media and its agents with impromptu and often violent absurdist displays, have kindly assembled to listen to my intentions regarding them.

‘I just want to do a book . . . but not with a tape recorder. An informal book.’

‘Yeah, okay. That’s okay,’ they smile.

Barney complains of a malingering stomach. An ulcer? It is my area, and I try to advise him what to do.

Gillian – the band’s newest recruit and Steve’s girlfriend – sits tastefully, cross-legged, biting at a Cornish pasty.

Hooky lounges in the comfiest corner, smiling, arm extending towards a glass of Pils.

Steve’s disembodied face grins satyr-like at me.

Is that it, then?

Not really. Rob puts me through a dozen questions disguised as casual conversation. Nothing direct. Smiling. Pushes up his glasses to confront me.

I cock up the replies. He is baffled. The band is baffled. I am baffled. Hooky rises to get the next round.

‘Is it alright, then?’ I ask.

‘It’s okay with me.’

‘Me too.’

‘Suppose so.’

‘Yeah, guess it’ll be alright.’

After lunch, Barney and I have a game of snooker in the ‘middle’ Yates’ on Oldham Street, which still has a sawdust floor. I get soundly beaten, and I think this clinches it.

It was ‘a simple question’ for, by then, I had known the band for almost three years – though I had not seen them personally since Ian Curtis’ death, about two years earlier. On that day in May 1980 the news of his suicide hit me like it did everyone who knew him. My main response was that of shock and disbelief – and perplexity: why would someone want to do that? We were all still young and excitedly making our way in life. What had become so unbearable to Ian that it could have cancelled out this lust for life? Then I felt sadness, for him and his family and friends . . . and the band – what were they going to do? My own sense of loss was strong, despite the fact that I had met Ian perhaps only half-a-dozen times – and this during the last ten months of his life. But ‘the kid’, as William Burroughs might have called him at Joy Division’s Plan K gig in Belgium – ‘get lost, kid’, the author allegedly responded when Ian asked if there was a spare copy of his new book going – had gotten to me.

Unlike with the passing of J.F. Kennedy or Jimi Hendrix, I cannot remember where I was or what I was doing when I heard the news. Now that I have realised this, it has set me delving into the recesses of memory. Yet, try as I might, I can recall little detail beyond these feelings. Through friends and family who had connections with Factory Records, I came to know about Ian’s death before most people . . . and in my mind there is an image of yards of black-and-white newsprint images – Melody Maker, Sounds, NME – all merged into one timeless scream of shock and incredulity. But nothing more.

I did not arrive at the Unicorn with Ian uppermost in my mind. Just over two years had passed and anyway – whatever the band’s personal feelings, whatever the practical implications for their music – they had shown a commitment to the future, a determination to keep on working and developing themselves musically . . . to literally play themselves out of their predicament. From their first gig after Ian’s passing – two months on at Manchester’s Beach Club – and Gillian’s arrival in September, they had played about seventy gigs throughout Europe and the USA, and released five pieces of vinyl: Still, a compilation Joy Division album, Movement, their debut studio album as New Order, and three singles. Freshly returned from their second tour of the States, they seemed far from defeated. They looked more like a band who knew they were about to turn a corner.

They had emerged from a long period of musical experimentation to find a new identity, literally learning as they performed. Nothing of use had been wasted. Characteristically refusing to be typecast, they had developed a distinctive electronic rock sound, quite different from that of Joy Division, and had already started performing material – ‘Ultraviolence’, ‘The Village’, ‘5 8 6’, ‘We All Stand’ – that would appear on their forthcoming second studio album. They would soon begin writing specifically for this record, starting with ‘Age of Consent’. As they always did when composing, they experimented with new sounds. Some of these were snatched from long hours of rehearsal; others were drawn from the musical maelstrom happening around them. Buoyed by their own collective confidence, they were on the creative ascendency.

By October, in Britannia Row Studios, having crystallised in Power, Corruption & Lies and ‘Blue Monday’ the various desires of each individual member – Bernard, Hooky, Stephen, Gillian, Rob and even Ian, for his spirit was ever-present at the sessions – there was the strong feeling that what had been achieved, especially with ‘Blue Monday’, would effortlessly plug into the moment and give the new line-up an enduring musical identity.

From left to right: Gillian Gilbert, Stephen Morris, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, New York City, July 1983.

INTRODUCTION

Dit . . . dit . . . dit . . . dit

The distinctive synth drumbeat of ‘Blue Monday’ shudders through the studio at Britannia Row. An ominous bass line peppers over the drum.

Boom . . . boom . . . boom

The singer’s monotone voice hovers above the backing. ‘How does it feel . . . ?’ Not a question, a statement. ‘If it wasn’t for your misfortune, I’d be a heavenly person today.’ Carrying veiled portents of a life lost and gained.

The musicians gather in post-mortem. The future biggest selling single of eighties’ Britain had aired, signalling – on their own terms – New Order’s coming of age.

In retrospect, the album Power, Corruption & Lies, to which ‘Blue Monday’ was tethered like a huge, gravitational planet and of which it really is a part, strikes me as being a record as significant to the post-punk generation as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was to the hippies of the sixties – my own generation. ‘[After these recordings] there was a feeling that New Order were making records that nobody else made,’ the Charlatans’ Tim Burgess told Simon Hattenstone of the Guardian in July 2015. ‘It was a new kind of rock’n’roll.’

Speaking with the NME in January 2015, New Order vocalist Bernard Sumner concurred that: ‘In 1983 there was electronic music, but not much electronic dance music. There were a few people playing music like “Blue Monday” in clubs in New York and London, but it was played on real instruments. Music like “Blue Monday” wasn’t being played on the radio or in clubs. There wasn’t anything that was as pure and electronic.’