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[sparse electronic music]
[narrator] This is a film about the past,
the present and the future.
It's the story of a unique collaboration...
between 12 young musicians,
a renowned conceptual artist
and one of the world's most truly iconic bands.
New Order have always
aggressively pursued the future.
[Morris] It's quite radically different.
It's never been done before to my knowledge.
What this project is, it's not about nostalgia.
We're trying to work on what can be done now.
We're trying not to look backwards.
[narrator] But for this project
New Order and their collaborators
had to reflect on and deconstruct the band's history
to create something very new.
[Sumner] We knew it was gonna be difficult,
but it took us all by surprise.
[Chapman] Rehearsing, finding the technology to make it work,
finding the players to do the shows.
[Gillick] It's kind of a concert
but it's kind of not a concert at the same time
and that's, for me, what's interesting.
[Saville] What this project kind of encapsulates
is an extraordinarily grand and long story.
The convergence completes to some extent,
a cycle and takes in an awful lot along the way.
[Morris] It's not entirely been fun.
A lot of it has been quite traumatic.
But most of us are still here.
I think it's 'cause we've worked it out together
as a group of people.
[narrator] This story is a celebration
of one of the most original bands in history
and a rare chance to enter their private world,
their artistic processes
and share in the creation of a collaboration
unknowingly decades in the making.
[applause]
[Sumner] I don't think anyone can accuse us
of dwelling in the past.
We're not that kind of band.
The making of this collaboration,
it was a process of reinvention...
that brought us back here some four decades later
to what is a notable place in our history.
We're at the old Granada TV building in Central Manchester
and this is where we had our first television performance.
On the wall, it says here "20th September, 1978,
Joy Division TV debut,
'Love will tear us apart'."
But that's wrong, isn't it, Steve?
Strictly speaking it is incorrect, yes.
-Factually incorrect. -[Sumner] Only slightly wrong.
There's two facts there. It's by implication.
The first fact is correct, 20th September, 1978,
Joy Division TV, you can put a tick there, correct.
Second fact, Love Will Tear Us Apart.
We'd not even written it by then, had we?
No. No.
It was Shadowplay.
♪ In the shadowplay acting out your own death ♪
♪ Knowing no more ♪
♪ As the assassins all grouped in four lines ♪
♪ Dancing on the floor ♪
[Sumner] It was less than two years after that TV debut
that Ian Curtis, our singer, took his own life.
It was extremely tragic,
but also a really strange period for us.
Our second Joy Division album Closer
and our single Love Will Tear Us Apart
were climbing up the charts.
But the rest of us were trying to work out what to do next.
This is where we got the title
for Love Will Tear Us Apart from!
Yeah, we looked at it
and thought that would be a good title for a song.
Yeah.
When Joy Division were on television,
I was away on a geography trip so I didn't see it at all.
So I was really annoyed.
Tell us about your geography trip.
Well, it was in Liverpool. [laughs]
[producer] Do you remember it well, Tom?
Six years old, not really, no. No, living in France, no.
I was four at the time.
I was ten. Steve was nine.
[laughter]
[Sumner] That Joy Division TV debut was the fateful outcome
of our first meeting with Tony Wilson,
the Granada TV presenter.
But more importantly, he was a passionate advocate
of new music and the kind of youth scene in Manchester.
Seeing as how this is the program
which previously brought you the first television appearances
from everything from The Beatles to The Buzzcocks,
we do like to keep our hand in and keep you informed
of the most interesting new sounds in the North West.
We'd done a gig at Rafters, I think, in Manchester.
It was like a Battle of the Bands competition
and Ian had had a few drinks.
And he went up to Tony and said,
"Wilson, you..."
"How come you never play our records or put us on TV?"
Gave him a bit of verbal, you know, which Tony loved.
And then we did the gig
and apparently it was a very memorable gig.
And in fact, Tony liked that concert so much
he formed the record company Factory Records.
The rest is history.
It really is history, yeah.
[Savage] Factory Records was Joy Division's record label
and it was a record label unlike any other.
It was more of an idea
than a professional record label in the early days.
Tony Wilson was the impresario.
[Saville] Everybody who was involved were kind of drawn in
to this solar system,
at the heart of which was Tony, being...
energetic
and magnetic as a personality.
[Savage] I was fairly major, I thought, in the music press.
I could get big features,
so he helped me to get a job with Granada Television.
The kickback was that I would write about his groups.
In some ways, even at that stage,
be a sort of curator of what was going on.
It's part of being one of these people
who are orbiting around Tony.
[Sumner] Years later, we got asked to do
the Manchester International Festival.
It seems really fitting to play here
and Granada TV reminds us of Tony,
and it was a kind of, you know, homage to Tony, really.
[Sumner] The choice of venue for the MIF project
might have been an unusual nod to the past for us,
but the concept was something really new.
Part concert, part artwork, the performance involved us,
a visual artist, an army of technicians
and more than a dozen young musicians.
The studio where we did it
looked a bit more like this, didn't it, really? Did it?
[Saville] Without a doubt,
New Order are at the point in their career
where they are afforded the luxury
of going through the motions, but not with this.
This draws them into the universe
of the Manchester International Festival,
which has a criteria,
to bring together
previously unimaginable projects
and combinations of individuals
who had not worked together before.
[Sumner] Manchester International Festival
is a bi-annual event
at which they have various kinds of artists
from all over the world, hence the "international".
[McGrath] MIF is first and foremost
a festival of entirely new work
which is pretty much unknown in the world of big city festivals.
MIF is probably at its best
when it's supporting artists
to do something that they haven't done before,
that might be a new kind of collaboration,
it might be working in a different art form,
it might be just pushing the boundaries of what they do.
That's the whole point of the festival:
to do something different
and not do a gig which we could have easily have done
and it would have been a lot easier.
[Haslam] The first part of the process
was really just emptying everyone's minds
of what had previously been done
and how these things should work
and filling that vacuum with just a lot of ideas.
New Order then came up with more or less this idea,
that they would like to do a synthesizer orchestra.
It was quite a complicated thing to pull off.
Yes, quite complicated.
Synth orchestra, what's that? How's that gonna work?
Steve enjoys a technical challenge anyway.
He had a great time doing it.
I had a great time doing it, yeah.
It means you can spend even more hours in your studio at home.
I really, really, really enjoyed it. Enormously.
Well, you like being in your studio.
Yeah. I like being in bed as well.
[laughter]
Bernard had a rough idea with the grids, the boxes.
[McGrath] The idea at the root of it very much from Bernard
was the idea of the wall of synthesizers.
That was the very first thing that came up with this project.
[Sumner] From a line drawing, it seemed pretty straightforward,
just build a set and put people in the cells, you know.
Stick a keyboard in each cell.
But the devil's in the detail and there was a lot of detail.
[Cunningham] The five original Manchester concerts in 2017
were apparently a great success.
So now, despite the complexity,
we've decided to do it all again.
It's a bit nerve-racking. We're not just leaving our home town,
but we're also taking it into spaces
that are a lot less accommodating than a TV studio.
The whole thing is so ambitious
and it doesn't fit into anyone's category,
so it's not like New Order's agent could phone up
one of the big rock promoters in any major city in Europe
and say, "Right, I've got a New Order gig for you."
But New Order weren't gonna compromise
so that kind of cut down
the number of venues and organizations
that would take the project on board,
so it ends up being Torino and Vienna.
[Sumner] It's got a freshness to it, you know,
and it's quite radically different
from the normal set we do.
So I'm glad we're doing it again, yeah.
That's the good thing about the gigs coming up,
that we have done it before last year, you know.
We've done a lot of the legwork
so we can enjoy it a little bit more I think this time.
What could go wrong? I mean...
[Morris] Do you want me to start the list now?
Actually, I don't wanna know what could go wrong.
I have to charge up the batteries on the laptops,
make sure they still work and, you know,
just get them back from the various people
who've been doing their homework on them
and get rid of all the porn and...
[laughter]
...we should be good to go.
It's the things that might go wrong that make it exciting.
[Cunningham] It's not only us that have got a load of work
to do for the new gigs...
[McGrath] Quite often we bring together
people who've not worked together before.
In this case of course,
bringing Liam Gillick and the band together
was in some ways a classic MIF combination.
The stack of synthesizer players could just have been,
you know, a backdrop to a concert performance.
What he did was take that idea
and in a way discover what it was about.
[Gillick] What you've gotta do is think about
what New York represents.
It's not the capital city, but it's the productive place.
It's the place of production of ideas, of music,
of contradictory cultures
and there is something in common there with Manchester
and this is where I try and have ideas.
Bernard had lots of ideas already.
They already had a lot of ideas structurally
and I wanted to work with those,
I wanted it to be an actual collaboration.
The focus would still be that it was a concert,
that it would still be the music,
that it would be them,
but it would be them in a kind of slightly skewed way.
I was very keen on the fact
that this would be experienced as a concert
and not a sort of weird art event, "with music by..."
It's really in a sense closest to sculpture.
So even if you're taking a room, people, an ambience, lighting,
that's still making something,
it's like putting things together.
It's that feeling of putting things together,
taking them apart, putting them together again, that's the key.
[fans chant "New Order"]
This is a song off our last album, Music Complete.
It's called Plastic.
♪ Got a feeling ♪
♪ In my head ♪
♪ Feels like thunder ♪
♪ Overhead ♪
♪ Intoxicated ♪
♪ I can't stop the flow ♪
♪ This love is poison ♪
♪ But it's like gold ♪
♪ Give me direction ♪
♪ Out of the cold ♪
♪ Show me affection ♪
♪ I'll sell you my soul ♪
♪ It's official ♪
♪ You're fantastic ♪
♪ You're so special ♪
♪ So special ♪
-♪ So iconic ♪ -♪ So iconic ♪
♪ You're the focus ♪
♪ The focus ♪
♪ Of attention ♪
♪ Attention ♪
♪ But you don't want it ♪
♪ You don't want it ♪
♪ 'Cause you're so honest ♪
♪ If you break me ♪
♪ Will you fix me? ♪
♪ If I'm missing ♪
♪ Will you miss me? ♪
♪ And I'll regret it ♪
♪ 'Til the day I die ♪
♪ 'Cause I didn't mean it ♪
♪ It was in my head ♪
♪ Feels like thunder ♪
♪ It's getting cold ♪
♪ This love is poison ♪
♪ But it's like gold ♪
♪ It's official ♪
♪ You're fantastic ♪
♪ You're so special ♪
♪ So special ♪
-♪ So iconic ♪ -♪ So iconic ♪
♪ You're the focus ♪
♪ The focus ♪
♪ Of attention ♪
♪ Attention ♪
♪ But you don't want it ♪
♪ You don't want it ♪
♪ Because you're honest ♪
♪ You don't want it ♪
♪ It's official ♪
♪ You're fantastic ♪
♪ You're so special ♪
♪ So special ♪
-♪ So iconic ♪ -♪ So iconic ♪
♪ You're the focus ♪
♪ The focus ♪
♪ Of attention ♪
♪ Attention ♪
♪ But you don't want it ♪
♪ You don't want it ♪
♪ 'Cause you're honest ♪
♪ You don't want it ♪
♪ One of these days ♪
♪ Right when you want me, baby ♪
♪ I will be gone ♪
♪ 'Cause you're like plastic ♪
♪ You're artificial ♪
♪ You don't mean nothing, baby ♪
♪ So superficial ♪
[Sumner] The choice of songs for this collaboration was,
like everything else in this project,
very carefully considered.
[indistinct chatter over music]
[Sumner] What we didn't anticipate
was how long choosing the songs would take.
It did require a certain amount of mental acrobatics
to try and get you in the head space
where you could detach yourself
from the normal two-hour set that we played.
It was weird. But it was good,
'cause you forget about a load of songs
and it's nice to bring them back.
I think it took about three days, didn't it?
About three days of listening to everything.
I wouldn't say it was enjoyable.
I wouldn't say it was arduous, it was quite revealing
'cause some of the songs you'd hear and you go...
[inhales sharply]
You know, "what was I thinking?"
[Chapman] We started with the first, very first
New Order album in chronological order
and all of us had sort of favorites as well
that we wanted to present.
So we sort of made a list up.
There was a lot of lists, yeah.
[Morris] There was easy, hard and difficult
and we just went for the most difficult.
It's not a greatest hits show and I like that about it.
You can revisit some, you know, corners of the catalogue
and it's a big catalogue now.
Picked the ones we felt were good,
but also the ones that we thought would be suitable
for the synthesizer orchestra.
So they had to have a certain amount of keyboards in them.
Like True Faith being like the biggest one.
You just have to say, "Well, right, OK,
well, that's gonna be dramatic if we don't do that
and it's gonna be dramatic if we don't do Blue Monday."
"So that's it, OK, we're not gonna do those."
[Morris] It's a funny one, Blue Monday,
because it is essentially what it is.
It's not really a song and if you try... it's not!
And if you try and make it... get too musical with it,
it loses something somehow
and then it just gets a little bit, I dunno...
Too posh for its own good.
I'm sure that they could have played it.
They could have played it, but it would have been very hard
because there's not that much in it,
apart from they could have got very elaborate
on the string bits, I suppose.
[Gillick] I think what's good about it
is that they did go for things which were quite surprising.
What this project is, it's not about nostalgia,
we're trying to work at what can be done now.
We're trying not to look backwards, I think.
I tended to pick some of the older songs
I wasn't involved with
because you work so much on the ones you are involved in.
When I was a kid I had that Unknown Pleasures album
and I listened to it religiously and, you know,
if you'd have told me that I'd be playing Disorder
with a couple of members of Joy Division,
I wouldn't have believed you back then.
It's, you know... really good to have that in the set.
OK, let's give it a go.
-OK. -[Morris] OK.
♪ I've been waiting for a guide to come ♪
♪ And take me by the hand ♪
♪ Could these sensations make me feel ♪
♪ The pleasures of a normal man? ♪
♪ New sensations barely interest me for another day ♪
♪ I've got the spirit ♪
♪ Lose the feeling, take the shock away ♪
[Cunningham] I think honestly it came up purely as,
"That's a really cool song;
why has that one been forgotten about?"
"Let's get it in the set."
It's been long enough now hearing Bernard and the guys
talk about it with regards to Joy Division.
They feel like they can come back to those songs
and play them and do them justice.
[gentle piano music]
[producer] Are there moments where Ian's suddenly in the room
or with you?
Yeah. Um...
Well, certainly singing that song
and singing any of his lyrics,
I always get an image of him then,
and obviously he's forever young in that image.
He's there and he's remembered and is...
Cherish the thought of him, all of us I'm sure,
everyone who was involved with him.
It was terrible what happened with him,
but he was such a determined, explosive character,
I don't think there's anything that we could have done
to change things apart from locking him up 24 hours a day
and...
you know, stopping him from doing that.
You can never really deal with suicide successfully,
because you're inevitably always going, "What if, what if?"
I do question really how long Ian Curtis
would have stayed in music.
I don't think that his health was up to it, to be honest.
And the three surviving members of Joy Division
made the decision to carry on because that's who they were.
Between Stephen, Bernard and Peter Hook
there was a chemistry.
The chemistry that had underpinned Joy Division.
They did demo sessions and finally they came to a result
which was the four members of New Order.
[Morris] It was all a bit awkward.
-Because... -When I joined?
-Yeah. -Yeah, it was very awkward.
It was very awkward.
[Morris] The fact that a lot of Joy Division fans didn't like it
was a great thing to me,
when they kind of got quite annoyed. [laughs]
"What the bloody hell are they doing?"
"They bloody... They look like
-they're enjoying themselves!" -"Are they going mad?"
-"The fools!" -"Got a bloody woman in there!"
"They've got a woman in!"
[Gillick] When she started playing with the band,
I always watched her 'cause I was curious about this role.
Like where she stood in relation to the others.
[Sumner] I think just having a female in the band
adds a level of temperance to our behavior.
[clears throat] And, um...
Yeah, we all behave a lot better.
[Cunningham] The reinvention came after the first album,
after Movement.
Movement was kind of "son of Joy Division" in a way to me,
to my ears. I'm not very keen on that album.
[Chapman] I think they all said to us that, on Movement,
it was pretty much them trying to work out it for themselves
and going forward.
Bernard seemed to feel literally...
I think so.
He looked physically uncomfortable
listening to that album again
and I don't think he has listened to it
since it was recorded,
because I think he was just finding his feet
as a singer at the time.
And Bernard gradually, he starts to find the voice,
a voice that hadn't really existed before,
which is romantic at times, very dark at times.
[Sumner] I never in my life dreamed of being a singer.
Never appealed to me.
I didn't wanna be the center of attention
and I didn't wanna sing.
There was no alternative.
The alternative was just to fail
and fall into a life of nothingness.
But we needed to break new ground
and the way to do that was with new technology.
We couldn't really afford to buy commercial equipment
in the early days,
which is strange because we could afford
to buy the Hacienda.
And we couldn't afford to buy these instruments
so we used to beg, borrow and steal whatever we could
and whatever we couldn't, I would build it.
You've gotta remember, you've gotta rewind the clock,
in those days, like a DMX drum machine
or a 808 or 909 drum machine
or a new sequencer, new synthesizer
was really pretty ground-breaking technology.
It's not like it is now.
We took the technology as far as you could take it
in the first day of ownership.
At first, Steve was a bit resistant
to both synthesizers and drum machines,
but when he realized it wasn't gonna put him out of a job,
he embraced it and became extremely proficient
at using both of those things.
There really was no need to worry
because of everybody that's ever been in New Order,
there's only me who's boring enough to read the manual.
[laughs]
I could never, ever have written music for an orchestra,
but I could program a computer
with a bunch of synthesizers on the end
and achieve something really similar.
And I listen to all sorts of music
because I believe that in every genre of music,
there's something good.
So I had this idea for this kind of, I don't know,
is it baroque, the harpsichord bit?
I programmed that up in a spare bedroom, you know.
Just that bit. [hums intro to Subculture]
♪ One of these days ♪
♪ I like walking in the park ♪
♪ When it gets late at night ♪
♪ I move 'round in the dark ♪
♪ The dark ♪
♪ And leave when it gets light ♪
♪ I sit around by day ♪
♪ Tied up in chains so tight ♪
♪ Tight ♪
♪ These crazy words of mine ♪
♪ So wrong they could be ♪
♪ What do I get out of this? ♪
♪ I always try, I always miss ♪
♪ One of these days you'll go back to your home ♪
♪ You won't even notice that you are alone ♪
♪ One of these days when you sit by yourself ♪
♪ You'll realize you can't shaft without someone else ♪
♪ In the end you will submit ♪
♪ It's got to hurt a little bit ♪
♪ One of these days ♪
♪ I like talking in my sleep ♪
♪ When people work so hard ♪
♪ They need what they can keep ♪
♪ A choice that leaves them scarred ♪
♪ A room without a view ♪
♪ Unveils the truth so soon ♪
♪ And when the sun goes down ♪
♪ You've lost what you have ♪
♪ What do I get out of this? ♪
♪ I always try, I always miss ♪
♪ One of these days you'll go back to your home ♪
♪ You won't even notice that you are alone ♪
♪ One of these days when you sit by yourself ♪
♪ You'll realize you can't shaft without someone else ♪
♪ In the end you will submit ♪
♪ It's got to hurt a little bit ♪
♪ One of these days ♪
♪ What do I get out of this? ♪
♪ I always try, I always miss ♪
♪ One of these days ♪
♪ You'll go back to your home ♪
♪ You won't even notice that you are alone ♪
♪ One of these days when you sit by yourself ♪
♪ You'll realize you can't shaft without someone else ♪
♪ In the end you will submit ♪
♪ It's got to hurt a little bit ♪
[all play Subculture]
[Sumner] Manchester isn't just our home, it's also home
to one of Europe's leading conservatoires.
The Royal Northern College of Music was the perfect place
to recruit more than a dozen keyboard players and vocalists
to form the synthesizer orchestra.
I made another sound to add to your original sound.
Right.
To just make it a bit more synthy.
Who's the four that play it?
Put your hands up, students!
[laughter]
[McGrath] Digging into those tracks, deconstructing them,
reconstructing them,
re-imagining them with the synth orchestra
has been a really in-depth piece of work.
[Saville] The project that they've embarked upon is brave.
It's brave for Liam and it's actually brave for New Order.
But of course it's good in that
it's put the group back into an uncomfortable space.
[synths play]
The early years, the formative period
was an uncomfortable space.
[Sumner] It's not been done before, so it was an experiment.
We've never done anything like it before,
so there's a lot of technical challenge here,
it's a lot of sounds to make,
a lot of scoring to do.
We knew it was gonna be difficult,
but it took us all by surprise.
I think New Order being New Order
always enjoy a challenge with technology
and what would be involved
in working with 12 keyboard players.
[Sumner] Steve finds it interesting,
the technological side of it, which is unusual for a drummer.
And a lot of the stuff for these gigs
he put together the technical aspect of it.
I think he took on a bit more than he could chew.
[Cunningham] I think at one point
Steven was having about three hours sleep a night.
I was worried for him? No, he's horrible.
Yeah, you always hurt the one you love.
He's impossible to live with.
[Duddell] My role with New Order was to kind of collate
all the MIDI information that's usually played by computers
and then rearrange that for 12 synthesizer players.
There's a lot of information running around.
A hell of a lot of cables.
There's also the music they have to read
and they also have another screen which I'm on.
[Cunningham] Playing this kind of music
you've gotta have a feel as well.
It's not just about, you know, being a shit-hot musician.
You've gotta get it.
[Morris] It was great that they could play stuff that fast,
'cause it hadn't been written that way.
They'd all been essentially programmed on a sequencer.
Nobody actually went... [mimics fast playing]
It was [slowly] ding, ding, ding, then you speed it up.
[Duddell] Two, three, four.
-[plays intro] -OK.
I was surprised that Joe could write down
the way that they should play them.
[Sumner] If we did it all on a computer,
there would be less layers.
So the idea with what we're doing is to split this music off
into more layers and more sub-components.
But you also get the different little variance in timing
that gives you a different quality to it.
[Duddell] So some people, for instance,
were actual bass players
so they just naturally found themselves
in the bass department of the synth orchestra if you like.
Where some of the more classical players were more suited
to the more flowing sort of lyrical lines.
We found, you know,
the right sort of place for everyone, I think.
It was a bit easier for me
'cause, you know, the students were taking up a few parts,
which I didn't mind.
What this project kind of encapsulates
is an extraordinarily grand and long story.
The convergence completes to some extent a cycle
and takes in an awful lot along the way.
So the whole journey has just been a bit surreal so far,
being able to do this.
When the email came round telling us to apply to this,
we didn't know if it was gonna be with New Order.
We were just told it was a high-profile band.
Yeah, it's been extraordinary. [laughs]
So we just walked in here and I saw Stephen Morris,
who's one of my favorite drummers ever,
just sitting here and that was ridiculous enough in itself.
I dunno, do you find yourself doing a bit of an act?
[laughs]
You know, you don't like to disappoint 'em by being too...
[producer] Normal?
Yeah, well, you are. Yeah.
[Haslam] Out of all the bands I think
who were part of that Manchester legacy and that history,
I think that a lot of them
reflected Manchester in the music, you know,
early Smiths did, you know, Oasis did for a time.
All bands reflect the environment that they're in.
[Savage] That came out say
in Kevin Cummins's famous portrait of them
on the Hulme bridge in the snow.
Again, you've got the city.
You haven't got the group in a studio.
You've got them in the city,
in their environment, which is reflected in their music.
[Morris] When people used to say that,
it was, "Blah, blah, blah, it's rubbish!"
But there's some truth in that, that you can't help it.
It just seeps.
In the early days when we were in Joy Division
and early New Order, it wasn't quite as swish as this.
It wasn't swish at all. It was post-industrial decay.
In a way, that wasn't very inspiring,
but in a way, it was really inspiring,
because in the middle of winter in Manchester
surrounded by all these shut-down closed factories
with smashed windows,
I think it affected the type of music that you made.
You know, it may have contributed
to the kind of sound that you had.
[♪ "Atmosphere" by Joy Division]
♪ Walk in silence ♪
♪ Don't walk away ♪
[Saville] That sense of the city has always been in Joy Division
and then in New Order
and also because New Order became the biggest group,
Factory became the biggest label.
Anybody that you talk to
will tell you that it was pretty chaotic at the time,
but clearly there was a driving spirit.
Often that spirit is embodied in the idea of Tony Wilson
but it obviously ran through a whole bunch of people.
[Savage] Rob Gretton, who was Joy Division's manager,
was the heart and soul.
He understood the music, was very involved with the city.
[Sumner] Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson died far too young,
but their contribution to Manchester,
to the city,
was incalculable and that is an incredible legacy.
Both Rob and Tony really, really loved Manchester,
and try and put something back into the place where you live
and it'll be a better place to live
is quite a simple concept, really.
That's what they wanted to do, but they didn't tell us
if that's what we wanted to do.
[laughter]
[Saville] And those things were just, you know,
a kind of naive and idealistic attempt to do things better.
You know, the Hacienda was incredibly naive,
but it was a...
Its premise was to do things in the way
that you would have them done for yourself.
And Tony had this vision of Manchester being regenerated.
It happened in '89, '90, you know,
a lot of which came out to the Hacienda nightclub
which started in '82
and by '88, '89
was one of the biggest nightclubs in the country.
And you have this idea of Manchester as a cultural force.
[Morris] They didn't expect Manchester to turn into
what it's turned into today.
I mean, it couldn't have got any worse to be quite honest,
so the only way was up.
But I don't think it had anything to do with us
being in a band.
It's nice to think that you could possibly change things.
♪ You're much too young ♪
♪ To be a part of me ♪
It's like New Order is part of Manchester.
Every corner you turn, there'll be some kind of reference.
Part of the DNA. The two go hand in hand, really.
[McGrath] You can't underestimate
the impact of Factory on the city
and the impact of Factory
on the reputation and feel of the city beyond its borders,
across the world.
[Savage] And without a doubt,
it was an inspiration to the very fabric of the city
and it has continued to be an inspiration
because it's then carried on by others.
[Haslam] The city's regeneration,
the city's reputation for art and culture,
the Manchester International Festival itself,
I don't think any of that would have happened without Factory.
And Factory wouldn't have happened without
Joy Division and New Order.
[Chapman] I wasn't born in Manchester,
but it was the music of Manchester
that made me move to this city in 1993.
I'd like to think of myself as an adopted French Manc.
[laughs] Living here for 24 years,
I just love everything about this city,
the people, the culture, the music.
Seamless transition was it, coming to Manchester?
-Completely seamless, -Yeah, sure.
-Like joining New Order in fact. -Absolutely, yeah.
No, it's a tough job coming into the band, no doubt about it,
because there's a lot of history.
The focus seemed to be on me, you know,
replacing Peter Hook and stepping in his shoes.
[Saville] There was a chemistry
that somehow fitted together,
you know, the friction of that chemistry
obviously became difficult, but that's often how it is.
I mean, chemistry is combustible.
I was encouraged to do what I do as a bass player.
[Sumner] Tom succeeded.
He's great to get on with, he can play anything.
On Music Complete, he came into his own.
Not that the other bass in our history wasn't great,
it was great.
How can I put it?
It was... It felt like it was a new band and a new start.
The band means a lot to people,
so all you can do is do your best and interpret the songs
and play them how you want to play them,
but respect the history of it, really.
[Sumner] Joe, we've put a bit of modulation
on the strings over there.
I know it's just like, hell, no,
but I think it's giving it a bit of movement.
A-ha!
Hello!
Hello.
♪ Every time I think of you ♪
♪ I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue ♪
♪ It's no problem of mine but it's a problem I find ♪
♪ Living a life that I can't leave behind ♪
♪ There's no sense in telling me ♪
♪ The wisdom of a fool won't set you free ♪
♪ But that's the way that it goes ♪
♪ And it's what nobody knows ♪
♪ Every day my confusion grows ♪
♪ Every time I see you falling ♪
♪ I get down on my knees and pray ♪
♪ I'm waiting for that final moment ♪
♪ You say the words that I can't say ♪
♪ I feel fine and I feel good ♪
♪ I feel like I never should ♪
♪ Whenever I get this way ♪
♪ I just don't know what to say ♪
♪ Why can't we be ourselves like we were yesterday? ♪
♪ I'm not sure what this could mean ♪
♪ I don't think you're what you seem ♪
♪ I do admit to myself ♪
♪ That if I hurt someone else ♪
♪ Then I'll never see just what we're meant to be ♪
♪ Every time I see you falling ♪
♪ I get down on my knees and pray ♪
♪ I'm waiting for that final moment ♪
♪ You say the words that I can't say ♪
♪ Every time I see you falling ♪
♪ I get down on my knees and pray ♪
♪ I'm waiting for that final moment ♪
♪ You say the words that I can't say ♪
♪ Every time I see you falling ♪
♪ I get down on my knees and pray ♪
♪ I'm waiting for that final moment ♪
♪ You say the words that I can't say ♪
♪ Every time I see you falling ♪
♪ I get down on my knees and pray ♪
♪ I'm waiting for that final moment ♪
♪ You say the words that I can't say ♪
Number one here. Could I have more orchestra?
Only a little bit more, not, like, loads.
[Gilbert] When you actually do it on stage with the orchestra
and the lights and everything and the boxes,
that's what makes me feel, "God, this is amazing."
[Morris] The stuff that Liam did,
I mean, that was a real surprise actually seeing the thing,
because looking at the pictures,
"That's all right, but, I mean, it's never gonna work is it?"
[laughs]
What you have to remember of course
is that we're building a kind of a machine here
and that was always my intention.
So they're not just standing there and pressing buttons,
they're reading music and playing.
So the computer's there for them to read the music
and it's scrolling.
[Morris] Each player's gotta have an individual score.
Each player's gotta have individual sound,
the program changes throughout the song.
They've got a camera so they can see the conductor
and they've gotta be able to communicate with us
and the sound people by microphones,
so... incredibly complicated.
That's your sheet music. Every different track,
there's different instruments you're playing
and you're playing more than one instrument per track as well.
[Sinclair] They're like patch changes.
Within one tune, you can have two, three or four sounds.
But it's just like, you read that one, you hit that one,
you sing into that one and you look at that one.
So 12 seemed to work musically and seemed to work visually
and you start to find a kind of balance at that point.
And you've got these cells.
[static crackles]
-Don't press it! -I think that's like
if you want everything to stop.
Like if you got an arm caught in it and you didn't wanna die.
If you, like, put your arm through there
'cause you're having such a good time,
and then it closes and your arm snaps,
then you'll have to somehow lean over, hit that
and the whole thing stops.
But why would you put your arm in there?
-I don't know. -Just getting so into it.
[laughs]
[McGrath] What Liam did was really think through
the visual logic of that.
He introduced the idea of the blinds,
the sense that there was something about revealing
and not revealing in this whole visual world.
[Gillick] Conceptually, I was thinking a lot about the book
Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet
which is really a book about voyeurism.
In French jalousie is the same as jalousie
which is the same as Venetian blind,
like something you can look through.
So, yeah, I wanted to play
not only with the idea that you can't always see them properly
or that they'll silhouetted,
I wanted those young players to have moments in the concert
where they can see the audience,
but the audience can't really see them.
When you go and stand up in those things
and when they're all shut, you've got a little slit,
you can see the whole audience,
'cause they are actually wood in the end.
But they're fixed to a mechanism
that's connected to the same computer
that's running the music,
the same computer that's triggering the lighting,
the same signal that's triggering the digital effects.
[Duddell] I think for the players,
it was initially quite weird
being in these kind of isolated cells.
So, they could all see the band and the audience and myself
but they couldn't necessarily see each other.
[Sinclair] It's pretty strange. You kind of feel...
It's like you're really connected to everything,
but you're isolated in this one pod.
Until we poke our heads through in between tunes to go,
"This is amazing!"
Everyone is slightly autonomous,
everyone's in slightly their own world
and that also accentuates, like, the way people behave.
[Haslam] When you see the students
in the synthesizer orchestra
and they're kind of indie dancing a little bit
when they're behind there,
and they're having fun.
It's a bit like dancing in your bedroom,
but 2,000 people are watching. [laughs]
You'll catch something out of the corner of your eye
and see one of the players doing some crazy dancing.
Keyboard dancing.
I feel it's quite liberating, to be honest.
I probably dance more in these gigs
than when I'm out and about. [laughs]
There was a mad Twitter rave after the first gig last year,
because people were dancing in the pods
and it was trending more than New Order. [laughs]
[Duddell] People might think
you can just do any concert in any venue,
but I think with the very specific nature
of the installation side of things,
it's not as easy as that.
[McGrath] There are complexities
about how it will fit in the different venues.
There's been some tension around that
because the spaces are different.
[Gillick] Right from the beginning I thought,
"This needs to be modular."
It needs to be able to be reconfigured
because I just know that from doing exhibitions.
Here, we're kind of like trying to fix something
that was for one space into a different kind of space.
Oh, gosh!
Wow. I need to see it from the front, really.
All right, Liam.
Hello. How you doing?
-Found it all right? -Oh, it's cool, yeah.
What do you think?
I see what you mean about height restrictions now.
[Sinclair] The ceiling's not tall enough
for us to have two rows of boxes.
So we're twice as long.
[Gillick] I'm secretly happy that we're in a venue
where we cannot do what we did before,
because it's too low in the middle.
[Owen] I wasn't sure if it was just gonna look
really sort of elongated in a different structure.
-Actually, it looks good. -It suits the room.
Being in structures like this, it's good
because it kinda reflects what New Order are all about.
[McGrath] One of the things that's great about this project
is to bring a really strong visual statement
right back into the heart of the music.
They haven't worked with a visual artist in the same way.
In this case, you do have this kind of creative autonomy
and I tell you why,
because there's a phrase that isn't used very much,
which is "I want."
"I like" and "I want" aren't used that much in this case
and I like that. [laughs]
It's about operating in parallel to something
and that gives you a lot of freedom.
[Haslam] That was the Factory way,
you trust somebody to do something.
On a bigger scale, that's how Factory had always dealt with,
you know, New Order.
Nobody told New Order what they should sound like.
They were given creative autonomy
and they wanted creative autonomy.
They have also then given creative autonomy
to the people that have been working around them.
So actually the collaboration element then becomes stronger,
because instead of it ever being a kind of weird compromise,
people actually follow their own practice and do it their way.
Somebody makes a video or someone does some artwork.
The same, I mean, very much applied to me with the covers.
You've always had this fine art element of interest in the group
and of interaction with the group's music.
It's not necessarily something
that the group are always aware of
but it does inform them and sets them apart
from your run-of-the-mill '80s electro mob.
[Gillick] My interest in Joy Division and New Order,
at the beginning, influenced my decision to go to art school.
They were much more influential on me
than any artist I could think of.
[Saville] There was
a fundamentally different relationship
between myself and Joy Division,
to that which then kind of evolved
over the next decade with New Order.
There was a personality to Joy Division
which I could only complement,
have a kind of a dialogue with that personality.
The absence of Ian, let's be straight about it,
the absence of Ian leaves a space around the group.
The visual work steps into that space.
So the covers are not about the music.
Nobody wants to talk about the music,
nobody wants to say what any of it is about,
no one is necessarily that sure what any of it's about.
[Gilbert] We didn't want to be marketed like a product.
[Morris] The music was good,
the image that that record projected
should be just as good.
[Sumner] When I was a teenager, when I bought a piece of music,
I always thought I was buying two pieces of art.
I was buying the album, music,
and I was buying the album cover.
So I wanted a great piece of music and a great cover
and sometimes, occasionally,
I would just buy a record for the cover.
I was really disappointed that someone could come up with
such a great cover and then played the record afterwards
and it was a load of dross.
That isn't to say that they are totally hands-off
and will accept anything, you know.
But once they've trusted somebody with a job,
then that person is allowed to express themselves
in the same way that they're allowed
to express themselves.
[Saville] The covers are conceived of independently
based on my own kind of
tracking of a zeitgeist through that period.
There isn't a singular language.
They're a journey
through the canon of 20th-century art and design,
which was my own journey.
They never said they liked them.
I remember calling Rob once about Blue Monday
and I said, "Does anyone like it?"
And he said, "They don't much mind it."
And in fact, there was not a collective "We like this"
until the cover of Regret.
And Bernard said, "I think you're getting the hang of it."
His artwork stands in its own right in the way I look at it.
It stands on its own merit.
[Saville] Liam's project is his dialogue
with his idea of New Order
as applies to other people who they might work with.
It's those other individuals' idea of New Order
that they come to engage with
and grids are almost autographic in Liam's work.
And of course, his project with New Order is a grid
and in this instance, the grid has to accommodate humans
and actions and performance.
When you look out in Vienna, you're gonna see architecture.
We go back to the double-decker thing.
That's in a rather beautiful, almost baroque theater.
A lot of art and music collaborations,
you really have like a big stupid art show
with some music tacked on
that kind of just uses the music that way round.
I wanted to create a frame,
and here you literally are in a frame.
I mean, it's exactly a frame.
♪ A thought that never changes remains a stupid lie ♪
♪ It's never been quite the same ♪
♪ No hearing or breathing ♪
♪ No movement, no colors ♪
♪ Just silence ♪
♪ Rise and fall of shame ♪
♪ A search that shall remain ♪
♪ We asked you what you'd seen ♪
♪ You said you didn't care ♪
♪ A sound formed in a vacuum may seem a waste of time ♪
♪ It's always been just the same ♪
♪ No hearing or breathing ♪
♪ No movement or lyrics ♪
♪ Just nothing ♪
♪ The sign that leads the way ♪
♪ The path we cannot take ♪
♪ You've caught me at a bad time ♪
♪ So why don't you piss off? ♪
[Sumner] I know the venue for this show here in Vienna
is in the most beautiful part of the city. Museum Quarter.
But when I'm on tour, I always like to try and get out
and see a few new things in every city I visit.
I've not been here before
and I've not got a great head for heights.
Um... We're not going up there, are we?
We don't have to go up there.
It's obviously a reference to the film The Third Man
which is a film noir,
I hope we're shooting this in black and white.
Yeah, that film encapsulates the atmosphere of Vienna
around the time of the Cold War, just after World War II.
It's a bit like a Joy Division song, you know?
It's got that kind of odd, weird atmosphere.
On paper, our survival shouldn't have happened really.
We abandoned all the work that we done in Joy Division
and never played any Joy Division songs
for ten years after the death of Ian.
So the odds were stacked against us anyway
after Ian died
'cause we couldn't be Joy Division Mark II.
We weren't interested in success or being famous or any of that.
We just wanted to travel round the world having fun
and that's what we did.
And as a by-product of having fun, we became successful.
[Morris] It's not entirely been fun.
A lot of it has been quite traumatic,
but most of us are still here.
I think it's 'cause we've worked it out together
as a group of people.
[Sumner] When there were a lot of things happening,
continually happening,
I was thinking, "Is this normal
or have we been singled out as a band
for all these things to happen to?"
You know, like all the deaths...
You think, "Has someone cursed us?"
Things seem to go OK for other bands.
Why is it such a bumpy road for us?
I have to say, what doesn't kill you makes you strong.
These last few years have been fantastic.
Just let's please nothing else go wrong, please. [laughs]
We're enjoying it now.
Let it be. We've had enough shit. [laughs]
[Haslam] I can't imagine what happens next.
I'm already kind of thinking,
OK, so they're gonna close this chapter
and a new chapter's gonna open
and so it's gonna be different and it's always different.
[Chapman] I think it's in the band's DNA to go forward,
to always seem to want to take risks
and be creative and try something new.
Collaboration, very refreshing for us
because normally when we're doing our normal touring
it's just the band, you know.
There's been a great deal of true graft
to get to where we are now, but quite enjoyed it.
Enjoyed working with the students and the band and Joe.
I know it's a terrible cliché,
but we make a good team and we do.
[Gillick] Every now and then someone says,
"That must be really great working with New Order."
And I say, "It's really something."
And nothing else I've ever worked on
has been really something and I mean it's really something.
I don't mean it's really nothing,
I mean it's really something.
I'm prepared for the fact
that it won't feel good to go back home.
They're all going away to do other things
and we'll be stuck here,
playing in the band on our own.
Yeah.
[Duddell] I suppose it's been a rollercoaster of emotions
like all big projects are
and it's now reaching a conclusion,
the last gig and...
I think, yeah, especially the encore,
will be quite sort of emotional I think, yeah.
Decades, it's possibly the most beautiful song that New Order
and Joy Division ever produced, really.
So to end the show with that one,
you know, it's quite... it gets you. It always gets me.
I think it was very smart.
I was a bit surprised, but I think it was very, very smart.
So moving, dangerously moving in a way.
[Duddell] I remember them when they were young, very young,
and I was very, very young
and here we are with a bunch of 20-year-olds, 21-year-olds
playing behind them
and the words of Decades are what you have to listen to.
[man] Here are the young men, a weight on their shoulders.
♪ Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders ♪
Written by a young man,
right, who's no longer with us,
the words written by a young man who died young,
being sung in front of a group of young musicians
who are, you know, taking each part of it and breaking it down
and bringing it together again.
It all comes together in that song.
[Sumner] It's added a new, fresh, exciting dimension
and a little bit of rebirth as well to New Order
and it's always good to occasionally have
a little reinvention as time goes by.
I mean, you can't reinvent the wheel,
but you can change the tires. [laughs]
[applause and cheering]
OK, we're gonna end tonight with a song by Joy Division.
We don't play it a lot of times
and it's a really beautiful song off the album Closer.
[cheering]
♪ Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders ♪
♪ Here are the young men, well, where have they been? ♪
♪ We knocked on the door of Hell's darker chamber ♪
♪ Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in ♪
♪ Watched from the wings as the scenes were replaying ♪
♪ We saw ourselves now as we never had seen ♪
♪ Portrayal of the trauma and degeneration ♪
♪ The sorrows we suffered and never were free ♪
♪ Where have they been? ♪
♪ Weary inside, now our heart's lost forever ♪
♪ Can't replace the fear or the thrill of the chase ♪
♪ Each ritual showed up the door for our wanderings ♪
♪ Open then shut then slammed in our face ♪
♪ Where have they been? ♪
[cheering]
Thank you so much!
Goodnight, everybody!
Auf Wiedersehen!
[cheering]