Well you don’t get much cooler than this! Tone Deaf was lucky enough to get the opportunity to have an exclusive chat with Joy Division guitarist and New Order front man Bernard Sumner recently about both bands’ new Best Of Album Total – From Joy Division To New Order. The album includes some of both groups’ best known and loved songs and also includes a new New Order song, ‘Hellbent’.
Our interview with Barney, as he’s affectionately known, went waaaay over time and while being an absolute legend, he told us stuff that sent shivers down our spine. On Joy Division front man Ian Curtis’ suicide, he says that he was frustrated that he couldn’t get through to the doomed icon, revealing “I tried talking to Ian many times but after he tried to commit suicide the first time…the problem with Ian was he’d tell you what you wanted to hear. So, if you wanted to hear that he had recovered or that he was feeling alright, that’s what he would say.”
He also has few kind words for his former band mate in Joy Division and New Order, Peter Hook, whom he says he will never work with again. He regards Hook’s tour last year with his band The Light, playing Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures in full, as flogging a dead horse, saying “flogging of Unknown Pleasures is probably at a point of no return.”
Check in tomorrow for the first part of our explosive interview with Sumner as he discusses his Best Of album and the circumstances of Ian Curtis’ death in full.
Update: Read part 1 of the interview here
Update: Read part 2 of the interview here
