Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook open up on their life in Joy Division and New Order in new biography
The estranged band members look back at their recording career in detail and reveal if there’s any chance of a reunion
Joy Division and New Order: Album by Album also includes full-length interviews with graphic designer Peter Saville, singer/songwriter Ana Matronic, producer Stephen Street, filmmaker Grant Gee, recording engineer Michael Johnson and director Charles Sturridge
Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook have taken a look back at their time in Joy Division and New Order and answered the question all fans want to know about the chances of a full band reunion.
Hook walked out of New Order in 2007 and the band split with his departure. The group reunited in 2011 and went on to release the acclaimed comeback album Music Complete, with Bad Lieutenant bassist Tom Chapman taking Hook’s place.
Both Sumner and Hook have now given extensive interviews as part of a career-spanning new biography Joy Division and New Order: Album by Album, where they were quizzed on their back catalogue across both bands.
As well as Sumner and Hook, Joy Division and New Order: Album by Album features long-form interviews with several band collaborators from across their career: graphic designer Peter Saville, Scissor Sisters frontwoman Ana Matronic (‘Jetstream’), producer Stephen Street (Waiting For The Sirens’ Call and Lost Sirens), recording engineer Michael Johnson (Closer and all New Order albums from Power, Corruption and Lies to Technique) and filmmakers Grant Gee (Joy Division) and Charles Sturridge (‘Confusion’).
Bernard Sumner
On Joy Division we would write all the music and then Ian would write the words and the vocals, so everyone had a designated job. But suddenly we’d lost Ian, so it was a struggle… Then the curtains gradually opened through music itself evolving round about the time that we were looking for a new sound.
Peter Hook
All groups are the same. They all argue. Put four people in a room doing anything and inevitably, something’s gonna happen. You’d go to Mars on a spaceship and immediately think, “We’re gonna be killing them all!” That’s what it was like. It was like a spaceship that you couldn’t get out of.
Peter Saville
We didn’t set out to form a company. Factory was not conceived as a company at its inception and never managed to function as a company for its fifteen years of existence. Factory was like a medium. Factory was a means to an end. Factory was a means to achieve something that the individual parties wanted to achieve.
Ana Matronic
I was a person with a great deal of melancholia, so New Order spoke to me deeply on that level… They were a band that I listened to alone in my room and that spoke to some deeply emotional parts of myself that I didn’t really know how to articulate.
Stephen Street
Their growth in the early 1980s was incredible. It was really quite outstanding. I found them very inspirational, really. I thought they were just a great band. I gave them a lot of credit for not packing up and caving in after Ian passed. I think for that they should be applauded.
Michael Johnson
They’d expanded their arsenal of synthesisers and drum machines a lot and that took prominence on Power, Corruption & Lies. It was a different group. You had three people who were the same as Joy Division, but it was very different. They were off the leash.
Charles Sturridge
I’m trying to look at Factory Records in the very early days. It just seems sort of crazy. Crazy is too easy a word. Too lazy a word. It inverted the idea of how you thought a record company ought to be, with no real logic in what the purpose or proper process was.
Grant Gee
It’s the closest I’ve ever been to a director-for-hire on a feature film that I’ve directed, and really my job was to make the film feel like Joy Division somehow. So that it felt like it was coming from inside their product, their art.
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