Totally Wired

‘Blue Monday’ is seen as the archetype, but the first song of the modern movement is two singles before that: ‘Everything’s Gone Green’, produced by Martin Hannett. And Bernard, who is a genius, absorbed everything he saw Martin and Steven doing - because Steven wasn’t just the drummer, he was doing all the techy stuff . .

I know the band hated Unknown Pleasures. And if they’d had their way - this is why musicians should be shot - it would never have been released.

What insight can you give me into Martin Hannett’s contribution? Steve Morris told me the band were dissatisfied with everything he did!
Yes. But two of the greatest albums in history! So fuck ’em! Martin was a svengali.

The great line about U2 is Bernard’s again. It’s Rapido in 1989, and he’s asked whether as a pop star you can take yourself too seriously. And Bernard says, ‘Yeah, you can. You can get a bit above yourself. Like that guy, what’s his name . . . Bongo.’

city in Britain they got booed. But in Manchester it was ‘Fuck The Clash, we’re here for Suicide.’
But back to post-punk - I always think of Joy Division and U2. Two months after Ian died, U2 still hadn’t broken. There was this wonderful kid who was a radio DJ and plugger, and he used to bring U2 to every radio station and every TV station in the north of England every three months to break his beloved U2, whom no one cared about then. I remember him bringing Bono into my office, and Bono sat on the desk and said to me how incredibly sorry he was about Ian’s death.

In Manchester everyone who’s a figure gets booed. That’s Manchester’s way of saying hello to someone famous. That’s very Mancunian.

Even mainstream rock figures contemporaneous with the post-punk groups, like Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush and The Police (who did a lot of improvisation in their live performances), were keeping alive these ideas about listeners needing to be challenged and artists needing to stretch themselves.

(The closest I could think of was the hip-hop movie Hustle and Flow, where we actually get to see the group write a crunk track, albeit with implausible ease and swiftness.)

Curtis stripped away the concrete, everyday details that a more observational songwriter would use to impart a sense of lived reality (the one big exception: ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’).

Joy Division’s songs were never topical in any crude sociopolitical sense, and a history lesson is no more required to understand ‘Shadowplay’ or ‘Disorder’ than an understanding of eleventh-century Scottish politics is necessary to be gripped by Macbeth.