“What the f— is going on?” Bernard Sumner says jokingly.
After crashing on both Zoom and WhatsApp, the founding member of New Order decided to give FaceTime a shot. He materializes, sitting on a couch with a white wall behind him. Mild, inviting eyes hide behind his glasses.
It’s been 45 years since he, now “below 70 and above 20,” founded the group alongside bassist Peter Hook, drummer Stephen Morris and keyboardist Gillian Gilbert. But it’s impossible not to mention New Order in the same breath as its previous ensemble in Joy Division. The story is all too familiar, with the band springing up after a Sex Pistols gig in Manchester.
“Famously, loads of people went … Morrissey was there, and the Buzzcocks were there … and everyone went out and formed a band,” Sumner quips.
And to anyone who has ever heard Joy Division, it makes complete sense. The band’s debut album “Unknown Pleasures” is imbued with the Pistols’ signature sense of “anarchistic rebellion, aggression and energy,” from the very first track. Sumner describes the gig as a pivotal moment in the history of music as it, sonically, gave everything the “kick in the balls” it needed.
“It was really ‘f— the establishment’ … we’d all had a pretty s— time at school and the rebelliousness and didn’t like the establishment,” Sumner says. “It was giving those teachers a kick! F— you and f— your lessons and f— all the s— you’re trying to teach us, because we’re not f— interested.”
“Punk gave us the excuse we really needed,” he adds.
But just a few years after Joy Division graced the music scene, the group came to an untimely demise following the death of lead singer Ian Curtis. And a year after that, New Order appeared with Sumner, Hook, Morris and Gilbert at the helm, and an entirely different sound to back them.
The band began to mix in synthesizers with the typical instrumentation, creating an unforgettable, hypnotic sound — every thump and woosh calls listeners to the dance floor and begs them to move. Sumner says it came from nothing, with no conscious effort being put into the familiar noise that would go on to define decades to come.
“Four people came together and that’s what we did,” Sumner says. “We got rehearsals, but we had no great plan, we didn’t give a s— about earning loads of money, we didn’t give a s— about being famous.”
In fact, their creative process boiled down to going to rehearsals, talking about what they saw on TV the night before and going to grab a baked potato from Spudulike near the studio.
“Then we’d go, ‘Should we try to write something?’” he recalls. “We go, ‘Yeah, okay,’ and then we switch the amps on, and just see what happened.”
He even tells a story of the first time they worked in New York, and met up with famous producer Arthur Baker. The latter was used to working with session musicians, and while doing so, decided to throw New Order into a studio while he finished up.
“He said, ‘Come up with some ideas,’” Sumner says. “We just couldn’t, because we’d been put on the spot and told to do it, and that had never happened before … the trick was not to think about it.”
However, even with its original and revolutionary style, New Order struggled to etch its name in the charts outside of the indie and indie alternative categories. In the ’80s, they were reliant on radio play and didn’t get much outside of college campuses in America.
Instead, groups like Sumner’s, such as the Smiths and Echo & the Bunnymen, ignored what was going on in the mainstream altogether, leaving the numbers game to pop music.
“We just ignored what was going on in the mainstream,” he says. “We didn’t really like what we were hearing on the radio, so we made our own radio.”
Of course, when the internet came around, it bypassed mainstream radio and absolved the band’s issues with getting airtime. This led to its undoubted success in bridging the gap between generations, with parents sharing the group’s records with their kids.
“Good music is good music, isn’t it? It always floats to the top,” he says. “Buy a New Order record, it’s a good investment for the rest of your life.”
Sumner claims the group is now “more successful” than they’ve ever been and says it comes down to a couple of factors, including cohesion.
“In the early days, we used to get f— up quite a lot and that f— up the shows,” Sumner says. “We used to play a really good one, celebrate how great it was, and then the next one would be terrible because we celebrated too much.”
“Our popularity has increased, really, rather than decreasing, and it usually decreases, doesn’t it?” he jokes.
This relationship between generations that grew up listening to the group and those now is all too apparent when it comes to festivals like Cruel World, which celebrates post-punk, new wave, goth and alt-rock. The event, first hosted in 2022, has brought the likes of Iggy Pop, Duran Duran and Morrissey back to the main stage.
Now, New Order is set to headline the festival on May 17 alongside Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It’s an unexpected ’80s revival that has maintained steady enough attendance to point toward becoming a staple, much like many of Goldenvoice’s other feats.
“There must be an appetite for this [era of] music, otherwise they wouldn’t be putting it on,” Sumner jokes. “It’s got soul, it really has got soul.”
As for what’s next in terms of new releases, the group recently had to shut down rumors of an album on the way. It’s been 10 years since its critically-acclaimed album, “Music Complete,” was delivered to fans, who are understandably craving a new project. Sumner says the delay comes down to general motivation to write again, with some members wanting to do so and others not being “too keen.”
“I’m one of the ones that does,” Sumner assures. “That’s all I can say, really.”