Chapter and Verse, the New Order singer’s autobiography, is full of genuine surprises – from his relationship with Ian Curtis to taking vomit through airport security

Hi Bernard. You’ve always been a very private person. How come you’ve finally written your autobiography, Chapter and Verse?

I should have called it Private Parts. We’re all private people, but as a musician I think that once you get to the point where there’s more of your life behind you than in front of you, you owe it to your public to explain yourself.

Why “Chapter and Verse”?

I threw a load of titles at the publishers and they liked that one. I thought it was a bit Ian Paisley (1), you know, [adopts uncannily accurate harsh Irish accent] “This is the chapter and verse on New Order …” But when the publishers explained that it could mean the chapter from a book and the verse from a song, I thought it was a really clever idea … that I’d come up with [laughs].

Despite that title, it’s a book of insights and spectacular personal revelations rather than a typical tell-all celebrity memoir.

“Musician takes drugs” has become almost a badge of conformity. So there’s not much of that. What is in there is the stuff that really matters.

Not many people will be expecting to find a transcript of a hypnotised Ian Curtis – two weeks before he committed suicide (2) – talking about his past lives.

Gosh. I’ve got to be careful not to sound like a lunatic here. I first read about hypnotism at school and I used to do tricks like getting a really skinny guy to arm wrestle the local bully. Much later, when we were in Joy Division, I read a book on hypnotic regression and how it could be used for therapy. I first hypnotised Ian at our rehearsal room. He remembered nothing, but when we did it again exactly the same memories came up, about him being a mercenary in the hundred years war (3). I recorded it and when I played it back to him he was astounded. It was my feeble attempt to try and shake him out of a death wish he seemed to have. He’d already tried to commit suicide. I’ve never listened to the tape since because it was too tender, but I decided to have it transcribed and put it in the book. Otherwise it would be lost forever.

There are things in the book that you say even your bandmates don’t know about, such as your particularly tough childhood.

I was brought up by my grandfather, my grandmother and my mother, who was a disabled single mum with cerebral palsy. Later on my grandmother had an operation that went wrong and she lost her sight. It was a difficult thing to write about, but I’m sure that experience shaped me and my contribution to Joy Division.

And your stepfather died in front of you …

Yes, there’s more, but people will have to read the book. I don’t want to break down in front of you [laughs].

Salford sounds very violent back then.

I was chased by a gang with swords and then a gang with spears. I was nearly kidnapped by a strange man in a car. You had to carry some sort of weapon and walk in the middle of the road in case someone jumped out on you, but I didn’t feel hard done to. I thought everywhere was like that.

You decided to form a band after seeing the Sex Pistols play their first Manchester gig in 1976. Of the 13,787 people who have subsequently claimed to have undergone the same eureka moment, who really was there?

Howard Devoto, Buzzcocks. Malcolm McLaren was definitely there because he took the money. He must have forgotten his glasses, because his hand seemed to miss the till and it went straight into his pocket [laughs]. I’m sure it was a mistake.

You went straight home and picked up a guitar which your grandmother had bought you years before, which was literally gathering dust.

Yeah. Punk rewrote the rules, but the big change for me was watching spaghetti western films. Before that, we’d had all these corny John Wayne films where the Indians were bad and the cowboys were good. Suddenly you had these weird, spectacularly shot Italian western films where everyone was bad. No one was the good guy. They all had these emotionally stirring Ennio Morricone soundtracks and that flicked a switch in me.

There’s a great story in the book about the time Joy Division sent out their first demo tapes, which doesn’t exactly fit with the dark, mysterious legend.

Our schoolmate Terry Mason could never get anything right. We’d already sacked him as drummer and guitarist, so we tried him out as manager. He sent a load of tapes to record companies but we didn’t get a single response. Not even “fuck off”. We asked what he’d sent out, then listened to one of these tapes. Halfway through the first track it suddenly went into the theme from Coronation Street, and his mother going “Terry, your tea’s ready!” [laughter] He’d made all the copies using a microphone in front of another cassette machine, so had recorded everything that was going on in the house!

Did Joy Division really bash out Atmosphere in the middle of a raging argument?

[Factory Records boss] Tony Wilson had cut a deal with Cargo studios in Rochdale. He said he had this really hot band and would let the studio manager, John Brierley, produce this track – which we hadn’t even written – in return for free studio time. Tony didn’t tell our regular producer Martin Hannett about this, and suddenly Martin turned up and there was all this shouting and finger jabbing. They were still shouting while we got on this little Woolworth’s organ that was lying around the studio and wrote Atmosphere there and then. In the end, Martin produced it and John engineered it really well. It’s one of my favourite Joy Division songs and productions.

If Terry Mason had turned up you could have had the argument on the track itself.

I did that when I produced Happy Mondays, actually [laughs]. Shaun called Bez a “fucking knobhead”. I had to explain that the vocal mic didn’t have a swearing filter on it.

Did New Order really accidentally erase an earlier version of Blue Monday?

I didn’t. The name you’re searching for is Mr Stephen Morris. For the last 20 years I’ve told people that we spent all day programming Blue Monday and then Steve caught the plug socket with his foot and wiped the memory. When I started the book Steve suddenly said, “Er. Actually, you’ve got that story wrong.” It turned out he’d tried to save the memory to cassette, but it only saved a load of white noise. We had to redo everything, but the original was better. It was funkier.

As you said, there aren’t many drink and drug stories in Chapter And Verse, but one is particularly memorable – the time you took a bag of vomit through US airport customs.

I was on a promotional tour for Electronic (6), and had been out all night in New York with Johnny Marr. We’d bumped into Seal, who’d said “Fuckin’ ’ell! It’s New Order and the Smiths!” I ended up in Harlem at 8.30am, absolutely wrecked. I had to go straight to the airport, but was throwing up into this bag. The security guy was looking at my eyes, which were so bloodshot I looked like some crazy acid casualty. I thought I was for it, but I put this bag of puke on the conveyor belt and he was concentrating so much on searching me that he didn’t notice that a bag of sick had just gone through the machine. I picked it up on the other side.

Was the title of New Order live video Pumped Full of Drugs appropriate?

Yes, but we were really ill in Japan and dying onstage. We called the video that because we knew people would think we were high, but we were actually on nothing stronger than paracetamol. A lot of them.

Another unlikely Joy Division story is that before he died, Ian Curtis was thinking of jacking in singing to start a bookshop in Bournemouth.

He had a wayward week. People were suddenly writing amazing things about us and we were about to go on an American tour. It was probably like waking up from a dream and finding that the dream was actually happening, but he was feeling a lot of pressure from all sides. He had his relationship with his wife and Annik (7), and I think he felt very guilty about his daughter, Natalie. Love literally was tearing him apart. Also, to have very bad epilepsy and be expected to go out and do concerts. I guess it just pulled him in every way.

After Ian’s death, how difficult was it for you personally to not just have to carry on, but to suddenly become a frontman, with the phoenix group, New Order?

I’d had so many deaths in the family that I’d been toughened up. I was still very shocked, saddened, depressed and because we’d put so much effort into making Joy Division our futures, I was really angry at Ian that he’d bailed out. But at the same time I felt very deeply sorry that he felt the need to take his own life. I understood why he did it.

My physical reaction was to not speak to anyone for three weeks, then I snapped out of it and just sort of decided that life can’t just stop there. Rob [Gretton, manager] said that we couldn’t play any Joy Division songs, because everyone would think that we were propagating our career off them. We didn’t play any Joy Division songs for 10 years after the start of New Order, which was a very honourable thing to do even if it meant shooting ourselves in the foot.

New Order did a lot of things that were perhaps commercially inadvisable, but artistically great. No singles on albums; no pictures of the band on record sleeves. Sometimes, not even the band’s name …

The name not being there was more to do with [designer] Peter Saville’s minimalist approach. He’s even more minimalist now. For our new album – which will be more electronic because I’ve fallen back in love with the synthesiser – Peter’s idea was to have a single silver line across the cover. We were all really into this. Then he said, “I’m thinking of getting rid of the line.”

Has it been as difficult or strange carrying on without Peter Hook as it was without Ian Curtis (8)?

It would have been stranger carrying on with Hooky [laughs]. It wasn’t as seismic as Ian going. We didn’t get rid of Hooky. He decided to go. All I can say is that I hope he’s happy in what he’s doing. Yeah. Even though he called me a cunt. And a twatto. [laughs] No ill feelings.

Chapter And Verse is published by Bantam Press. A New Order album is expected next year on Mute Records.

Footnotes

(1) The recently deceased firebrand Irish Unionist politician.

(2) The Joy Division singer hanged himself at his Macclesfield home on 18 May 1980.

(3) A series of conflicts between England and France, from 1337 to 1453.

(4) Bernard’s third great band, with Johnny Marr, in the 1990s.

(5) Belgian lover Annik Honoré, who died in July this year.

(6) In 2007, New Order’s legendary bass player announced that New Order had split up. The band denied this and carried on without him.