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Overview
Bernard Sumner pioneered the post-punk movement when he broke onto the scene as a founding member of Joy Division, and later as the front man of New Order. Heavily influencing U2 and The Cure while paving the way for post-punk revivalists like Interpol, Sumner's has left an indelible mark on punk and rock music that endures to this day.
Famously reluctant to speak out, for the first time Sumner tell his story, a vivid and illuminating account of his childhood in Manchester, the early days of Joy Division, and the bands subsequent critical and popular successes. Sumner recounts Ian Curtis' tragic death on the eve of the band's first American tour, the formation of breakout band New Order, and his own first-hand account of the ecstasy and the agony of the 1970s Manchester music scene.
Witty, fascinating and surprisingly moving, Chapter and Verse is an account of insights and spectacular personal revelations, including an appendix containing a complete transcript of a recording made of Ian Curtis experiencing hypnotic regression under the Sumner's amateur guidance and tensions between himself and former band member Peter Hook.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466889880 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 11/03/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Bernard Sumner was a founding member of Joy Division and, after the death of Ian Curtis in 1980, became lead singer and guitarist of New Order.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter and Verse
New Order, Joy Division and Me
By Bernard Sumner
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2014 Bernard SumnerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8988-0
CHAPTER 1
Streetlights
Los Angeles produced the Beach Boys. Dusseldorf produced Kraftwerk. New York produced Chic. Manchester produced Joy Division.
The Beach Boys' harmonies were full of warmth and sunshine, Kraftwerk's groundbreaking electronic pop was suffused with Germany's post-war economic and technological resurgence while Chic's music thrummed with the joyous hedonism of late seventies New York.
Joy Division sounded like Manchester: cold, sparse and, at times, bleak.
There's a moment from my youth that I think illustrates perfectly where the music of Joy Division came from. It's not even an incident as such, more a snapshot, a mental photograph that I've never forgotten.
I was about sixteen. It was a cold, depressing winter night and I was hanging around with some friends on a street in the Ordsall district of Salford doing nothing in particular, too old and restless to sit around at home, too young to go out drinking. I'm fairly sure Peter Hook was there, and so was another friend called Gresty, but the cold had killed the conversation. There was a thick fog draped over Salford that night, the kind of freezing, cloying fog whose chill penetrates right to the bone. Our breath came in clouds, our shoulders were hunched and our hands thrust deep in our pockets. But what I remember most is looking up the street and seeing how the orange sodium streetlights had all been given dirty halos by the fog. Making it feel like you had the flu. The lights would have been dingy enough at the best of times, but the fog, grimy with the dirt and grit of industry, had reduced them to a string of murky globules running the length of the street.
The silence was broken by the roar of an engine and a screech of tyres. A car came racing around the corner, the headlights dazzling us for a moment, and in it I could hear a girl screaming her head off. I couldn't see her, I couldn't see anyone in the car, there was just this raw, terrified screaming as it shot off up the road and disappeared into the fog. Silence descended again and I just thought to myself, There's got to be more than this.
When there's no stimulus to be found on the outside, you have no option but to look inside yourself for inspiration, and when I did it set off a creativity that had always been inside me. It mixed with my environment and life experiences to make something tangible, something that expressed me. For some people it's channelled on to a canvas, for others it emerges on to the page, or maybe in sport. In my case, and those of the people with whom I created the sound of Joy Division, it emerged in music. The sound we made was the sound of that night – cold, bleak, industrial – and it came from within.
Manchester was cold and bleak on the day I was born, Wednesday 4 January 1956, in what is now the North Manchester General Hospital in Crumpsall. It was barely a decade after the end of the Second World War and the conflict still loomed large over the country, from the bomb sites that remained in every city and the legacy of post-war austerity – meat rationing had only ended eighteen months before I was born – to the all-too-vivid memories of the generations before mine. The spectre of war had not vanished entirely: the Suez Crisis was brewing and Cold War tensions were higher than ever following the formation of the Warsaw Pact the previous year.
It wasn't all negative, though. There were signs that some things were changing. Even though I have to admit that I'm no big fan of the fifties, Bill Haley's 'Rock Around The Clock', one of the most influential records of the century, was top of the charts on the day I was born, and six days later Elvis would go into the RCA studios in Nashville to record 'Heartbreak Hotel'.
I may have arrived on the cusp of an enormous cultural shift, but mine wasn't the usual kind of birth. My mother, Laura Sumner, had cerebral palsy. She was born absolutely fine but after about three days she started having convulsions that left her with a condition that would confine her to a wheelchair her entire life. She would never walk, would always have great difficulty controlling her movements, and the condition would also affect her speech.
I never knew my father. He'd disappeared from the scene before I was born and I still have no idea who he is. Perhaps strangely, it's never bothered me; I certainly don't believe it's really affected me. I think he's dead now; I've just got that feeling. But even if he was alive I wouldn't have any interest in meeting him. I don't think you miss what you've never had.
Alfred Street was a small cobbled street of Victorian terraced houses not far from Strangeways Prison and close to the River Irwell. Lower Broughton was a typical Salfordian working-class area (the street that inspired Tony Warren to create Coronation Street wasn't far away), governed by the needs of industry: Alfred Street and its neighbours provided the labour force for a range of local factories and mills and, within a few minutes' walk, there was a potted version of the entire industrialized north-west: an iron works, copper works, cloth-finishing works, paint factory, chemical works, cotton mill, saw mill and brass foundry. The song 'Dirty Old Town', with its powerful evocation of love in a northern industrial landscape, was written about Lower Broughton. Living close to Strangeways Prison offered additional sobering insight into the underbelly of life: I remember as a boy once asking my grandfather who the line of men in the weird uniforms digging the road were and he told me they were prisoners on a chain gang detail.
Number eleven was my grandparents' house and, when I was born, my mother was still living with them because she needed so much care. Our house was typical of both the area and the time in most respects: downstairs there was a kitchen, main living room, a parlour that was used for special occasions (although in our house my mother slept there, because she wasn't able to get up the stairs), and an outdoor toilet. We didn't have a bathroom. Upstairs, my bedroom was above the living room, my grandparents' above the parlour. Also upstairs was a small storage room that really gave me the spooks as a child: my granddad had been an air-raid warden during the war and it was packed with gas masks, sandbags, blackout curtains and all sorts of other wartime detritus. I don't know if it was because I'd heard tales of the war and the terrible things that happened, but there was always something frightening about that room. I avoided it.
My grandfather John Sumner, a very knowledgeable and interesting man, was like a father to me. He was Salford born and raised and worked as an engineer at the Vickers factory in Trafford Park. He'd lost his own father when he was ten: my great-grandfather had gone off to the First World War with the Manchester Regiment and been killed at the second Battle of Passchendaele in 1917. My grandmother, Laura, was a very warm, very caring person who came from an old Salford family, the Platts. Her mother, like my mother, was also called Laura: it was a tradition in my family for girls to be named after their mothers, so my grandmother was 'Little Laura' and my great-grandmother was always known as 'Big Laura'.
My granddad had a routine that he'd perform twice a day, once in the morning before leaving for work and once when he returned home in the evening. He'd come through the front door and walk straight through the house exclaiming, 'Ah, fresh air! I need fresh air!', go out into the backyard and take a succession of long, slow, deep breaths. The trouble was, at the end of our street, spewing out noxious fumes was the Wheathill Chemical Works. It was horrible; some days you'd even be told not to go out that day, as they were burning something there. I can almost conjure up the acrid smell today, yet my grandfather would happily breathe it in while extolling the health benefits of inhaling fresh air.
My great-grandmother, Big Laura, lived right opposite the chemical works. She'd had, I think, eight or nine daughters before having a son. Once he'd arrived, she felt she could call it a day. I remember going to visit her when I was very young and seeing my great-grandfather too, a lovely bloke who worked as a wheeltapper on the railways. I remember him being a very warm, kind person, but one day I was told he'd 'gone on a long train journey'. I have very strong memories of him, so he clearly made a big impression on me, yet I recently discovered that I was only about two years old when he died.
After he'd died, my gran used to go and visit my great-grandmother every day, taking her a jug of Guinness from the pub, which she'd sit by the fire and drink – for the iron, she said. It must have worked because, despite living for most of her life opposite a chemical factory that was spewing out all sorts of fumes, she lived to be nearly ninety. Eventually, her house was pulled down and she was moved to the top floor of a fourteen-storey block of flats. I remember visiting her there, looking out at the view from the balcony and thinking, Wow, this is fantastic, you can see for miles. All the cars on the streets below looked like Dinky toys and I could see the hills and the countryside beyond the city: to me as a boy it was magical, but of course for an old woman like my great-grandmother, way up there on the fourteenth floor, a long way from anything, it turned out to be more like a prison.
My Auntie Amy stayed on to look after my great-grandmother. All her siblings had married and she effectively gave up her own life in order to help her. It seems that when she grew too old to marry it dawned on her what she'd missed. In dedicating herself to her mother's welfare, her own life had passed her by, and that realization caused a breakdown that left her in Prestwich mental hospital for the next thirty-two years. Occasionally, Auntie Amy would slip out from the hospital unnoticed and head for our house. When she appeared at the door my mum would send me upstairs, telling me to shut my bedroom door and push the bed behind it. I was to stay there until she told me it was safe to come out. I'd hear Auntie Amy saying that a man was coming round with an axe to kill us all, how she'd come to warn us that we were all going to die. My mum would keep her talking until the police arrived and she'd be taken back to Prestwich. It was heartbreaking. All my other aunties were kind, warm and bubbly, and that's the kind of woman Auntie Amy should have been too.
I had lots of friends on Alfred Street, like Raymond Quinn, David Wroe and Barrie Benson, not to mention more members of my family who lived there as well. I didn't have any brothers or sisters, but my Auntie Doreen lived next door with my cousins David and Stephen and across the road was my Auntie Ruth, who had a daughter, inevitably also called Ruth. My Auntie Ada and Auntie Irene lived on the same street too, with their children, so I had a very sociable childhood. We spent most of our time on the streets. We were always kicking a ball around, hanging out on the corner getting into trouble and wondering what was going on in the other parts of town. What was out there?
While it was a pretty normal working-class Mancunian upbringing in many ways, the thing that set our family apart was my mother's condition. As well as the obvious physical problems she faced, she was also a very angry person. Whether this was because she was frustrated at her disability, maybe even suffered from depression – something that was rarely diagnosed in those days – I don't know for sure, but whatever the cause, her anger was usually focused on me, to the point at times of something close to cruelty.
With my grandparents being such warm, kind people, I was drawn more to them emotionally than I was to my mother, and this may have contributed to her anger. I had lots of friends locally and was no better or worse behaved than anyone else, but I seemed to be on the receiving end of more, and more severe, punishments than anyone I knew.
I was rarely allowed to go out: when the other kids went to the park or the cinema I wouldn't be allowed to go with them. For some reason, even though ours was a close community with plenty of kids my own age who had plenty of people watching out for them, my mother wanted me pretty much where she could see me. I was allowed out into our street and the immediate vicinity, but there were very strict boundaries as to how far I could go. Kids love to roam, and the children round our way were no exception, but while others would go into Manchester or over to Heaton Park, I'd have to stay put, left on a street corner watching the others disappear into the distance in a laughing, noisy rabble.
I hardly ever went against my mother's wishes through sheer fear of what would happen if I did, but one day I did dare to cross the boundaries she'd set for me. I didn't go very far, just a couple of streets away with a gang of kids, but somebody spotted me and word got back to my mother, who went absolutely ballistic as soon as I walked through the door. I was made to swallow cold, sour tea, leaves and all, until every last drop had gone and then told to stand and face the wall while she told me at length and in no uncertain terms what an awful child I was, something I was made to repeat back to her. I stood there, hands behind my back, nose almost touching the wallpaper, the revolting bitter taste of cold tea still in my mouth and tears running down my face, trying to work out just why she thought I was so terrible. Granted, on this occasion, I had gone against her wishes, probably due to peer pressure more than anything else, but the level of invective being aimed at me as I stood there sobbing against the wall seemed to be about much more than me sneaking quietly out of the front door when nobody was looking. This kind of thing would happen fairly often.
I was far too young to understand at the time of course, but in hindsight I wonder if she was angry at me because my father had disappeared from her life. My mother's circumstances were unusual enough, given her disability, but she was also an unmarried mother, something fairly uncommon in the fifties and sixties. How and why their relationship ended I don't know: my father was never mentioned. Maybe this was one source of her anger at me, that I was the living, breathing legacy of that relationship: I was a permanent reminder of him–maybe I even looked like him. Who knows, perhaps I was kept in because he'd gone out one day and never come back.
When, in the years since, I've tried to work out why she treated me the way she did, it's occurred to me that the horrific Moors Murders might also have had something to do with it. They were going on around that time, so there would have been stories of Manchester kids disappearing. In any case, there were long periods during my childhood where I was kept on an incredibly tight rein. It reared up again when I was older, around sixteen, when my mother didn't want me going to parties and staying out late. When I was allowed to go I'd have to be home by ten o'clock while my mates would be out till midnight.
Yet, for all I've thought about it, I still don't really know why she treated me that way and I probably never will. To an extent, I kind of understand the way she was with me. She felt trapped by her disability: she was effectively a prisoner in her own body. In that situation, it's perhaps understandable that any wrongdoing by me, perceived or actual, was blown up. Life in the working-class districts of Manchester was tough in those days at the best of times, but my mother was a single parent in a wheelchair and I can only guess at what that did to her state of mind. I remember seeing her trying to walk up the stairs: an image that in itself probably best illustrates my mother's battle with what life had given her. She railed against her condition, doing everything she could to make things more bearable. She tried various homeopathic remedies and we'd regularly have all sorts of quacks calling at the house, but for all her efforts her life remained very difficult and she must have felt extremely frustrated. I suppose she had to take it out on someone. Unfortunately, that person happened to be me.
She wasn't cruel all the time; there were definitely happier times and occasions: I remember we had some wonderful, magical Christmases, for example. But the moment I did something wrong, sometimes even the most trivial thing, she almost seemed to relish the prospect of punishing me for it. It didn't fuck me up or anything, but my childhood was played out over a constant undercurrent of fear of my mother.
In 1961 she married a man called James Dickin, who also suffered from cerebral palsy and wore callipers on his legs. She got him to hit me pretty hard a couple of times. I'm sure it was common back then for fathers to hit their sons and I don't really hold it against him, but it didn't make me any less scared of her. The knowledge that, even though she couldn't hit me, there was someone in the house who could made sure the fear was always there, even if most of the punishments were psychological rather than physical.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Chapter and Verse by Bernard Sumner. Copyright © 2014 Bernard Sumner. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Time,
Preface,
Chapter One: Streetlights,
Chapter Two: Youth,
Chapter Three: Complex,
Chapter Four: Scumbags,
Chapter Five: Rebellion,
Chapter Six: Awaking,
Chapter Seven: The organization,
Chapter Eight: Cold winds blowing,
Chapter Nine: Graft,
Chapter Ten: Agecroft to Islington and that fateful day,
Chapter Eleven: A new sound in a new town,
Chapter Twelve: Resurrection,
Chapter Thirteen: Here comes success,
Chapter Fourteen: New York, London, Los Angeles, Knutsford,
Chapter Fifteen: I've got an idea,
Chapter Sixteen: Too much drink, but not enough to lose,
Chapter Seventeen: We're singing for England,
Chapter Eighteen: Burn bright, live long,
Chapter Nineteen: The tempest,
Chapter Twenty: 'It's a disturbing story, there's no way round it',
Chapter Twenty-one: 'No matter what you say or who you are, it's what you do that matters',
Chapter Twenty-two: The epilogue,
Postscript,
Photographs,
Appendix One: Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner hypnosis recording,
Appendix Two: A Conversation with Alan Wise,
Index,
Acknowledgements,
Copyright,