New Order > Brotherhood [Collector's Edition] > Fact 150 Brotherhood < Peter Saville

Brotherhood [Collector's Edition]; front cover detail
Brotherhood [Collector's Edition]; front cover detail
Brotherhood [Collector's Edition]; front cover detail
Brotherhood [Collector's Edition]; front cover detail with old version of cover

Release date

29 September 2008

Tracklisting

Brotherhood:

01 Paradise
02 Weirdo
03 As It Is When It Was
04 Broken Promise
05 Way of Life
06 Bizarre Love Triangle
07 All Day Long
08 Angel Dust
09 Every Little Counts
10 State of the Nation

Brotherhood bonus disc:

01 Bizarre Love Triangle (12" Version)
02 1963 (12" Version)
03 True Faith (Shep Pettibone Remix) (12" Version)
04 Touched by the Hand of God (12" Version)
05 Blue Monday '88
06 Evil Dust
07 True Faith - True Dub
08 Beach Buggy

CD description [via Amazon.co.uk]

Brotherhood is a document of growth for New Order's ever-expanding sonic landscape. Packaged in the stark, utilitarian style that was the Factory label's trademark, the album belies its minimalist presentation with a sprawling, intricately crafted collection of pop gems, inspiringly diverse, yet uniformly infused with the band's trademark sincerity and off-kilter melodic sense. The album opens with the deceptively straight drum hits of Paradise, which quickly adopts an intense double-tracked vocal and with it, an air of danger that offsets its soaring melody. New Order developed into masters of intellectually stimulating dance music, an elusive combination of qualities. The album's biggest hit Bizarre Love Triangle exemplifies this rare mixture - atop a throbbing, heavily sequenced dance beat is played out a drama complete with consistently engaging musical shifts, dramatic lyrical turns, and a chorus that's instantly memorable and nothing short of gorgeous. The wistful vulnerability of All Day Long dissolves into a sprawling, regal affair and the supremely sweet Every Little Counts show yet another dimension to New Order's sonic richness.

Liner notes

Peter Saville's New Order covers were always about taking art to the record shop racks. There were invariably clues to be decoded, mysteries to savour and functional beauty to admire, as with the music therein. One of his ploys for Brotherhood, eventually to be realised on a just a few 'special edition' copies, was to have the album released in a sleeve coated with titanium zinc, an architectural material used for cladding the exterior of buildings, one of the most famous being the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

When Brotherhood was released in October 1986, a mere 16 months after Low-Life, it presented the most thorough synthesis of sleeve, title and contents of all the New Order albums. Even as a photograph on cardboard this looked heavy and foreboding, severe and indifferent. Redolent of Masonic secrecy, but also closeness, you wondered, what was this metal protecting? And what did New Order have to hide? The band who apparently didn't like touring had spent just four of the preceding 22 months without a concert engagement, and in April 1986 they'd entered Dublin's Windmill Lane studio to record their fourth LP.

In search of a different, more secluded atmosphere away from the visitors who came prying whenever they recorded closer to home, they stayed in the country. A more significant change was to do something they had never previously formalised - they separated their rock and dance selves off into distinct songs.

"Listen to it and you can hear it has two different sides," says Peter Hook. "There were battles raging on Brotherhood." Bernard Sumner is more sanguine; "We'd always had that balance of electronics and band stuff. I was always pushing for electronics, and Hooky was always pushing for the band stuff, which was fair enough, I think we needed the band stuff. And by luck it got tipped the band way on Brotherhood. It was a very dense album, because we'd gone a bit mad on overdubs, so it was very layered, and very dense."

Stephen Morris agrees. "There's too much on it," he reckons. "It's very digital-sounding. We'd bought this thing called the Transdynamic, which nobody quite knew how to work, but it made everything sound really fucking hard! So it took out all the dynamics - made it all go grrr (pulls psychotic face)."

These are ambivalent reactions. And anyone expecting another LP of bright, big tunes in the Low-Life mould was to be largely wrongfooted. Yet however separated they may notionally be, the emotional range of rock and dance music's physicality were present in spades in these songs' energetic beats, rock basslines, classical-sounding synths and enigmatic lyrics.

Take the soaring grandeur of Weirdo - a nod to the sound of Power, Corruption & Lies - or the phosphorescent Way Of Life, a song whose guitar outro echoes Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart. There's also the tender synth rock of Bizarre Love Triangle, of which Stephen opines, "That was and is a real crowd pleaser, one that you'd feel bad about leaving out of your set. It's got that good combination of rock and dance, so everybody was happy. Those are the moments we strive for!" The vinyl-edition closer Every Little Counts, meanwhile, is surely one of their finest songs. Initially recalling Lou Reed, it includes one of their most luminescent instrumental passages and spirals into cacophony before ending with the now-nostalgic sound of a needle scraping across a record. It also contains Bernard's genuine laughter and attempt to compose himself while singing, "You look like a pig, you should be in a zoo." Was this what Paul Morley meant in his neworderstory script when he wrote of the band, "Because they cared. Because they couldn't care less. Because you have to laugh. Because you have to cry"? And was this the kind of thing to help crack America?

It's this line and others like it that have led some to accuse New Order lyrics of naivety. While Bernard's voice always worked as a component of the music, it wasn't easy to know what he's singing about, though the words have always invited interpretation. So it was on Brotherhood. For example, is the possibly murderous narrator of Weirdo who pleads with a woman called Jolene the same man Dolly Parton is keen not to lose in her own song of that name?

"I probably just thought it was an unusual name on some drunken level," says Bernard. "But that sounds better than my description so I'm fine with that."

The album does seem to contain feelings of guilt, and present extreme situations. "I think that's true," he agrees. "On a personal relationship level, at the time, that is true. That's what my life was like. I couldn't have expressed it literally, so I expressed it abstractly, through the song. When I'm writing a lyric, the perfect analogy is the inkblot test (the Rorschach test used by psychologists to examine their patients' personalities and emotions). That's exactly what I do. I write music first, on my computer, and that's the ink blot - what do you see in this inkblot? The words come out of that. Pin the meaning down and you stop people relating to it in their own particular way."

"But I'm not trying to be clever or to impress anyone," he stresses. "I don't wake up thinking I have a message for the world and it does not feel like natural state, wanting people to know my innermost thoughts. To me, the 'meaning' in a song is the music - when I listen to a song on the radio, I listen to the tune first, if the rhythm's good, if I like the sound of it, if it's a slow track, if it's beautiful and touching... then I'll start listening to the lyrics."

After working at Windmill Lane, the group returned to the UK to finish off at Liverpool's Amazon. As was their wont, recording went right up to the wire. "There was quite a lot of stuff on this one that got finished off in the studio," says Stephen. "I remember definitely doing fucking lyrics at Amazon, at the very end, all of us! Echo & The Bunnymen were next door, and Mac was amazed at us all sitting at the mixing desk, desperately trying to come up with words! Ha ha!"

If only such uncomplicated jollity was the whole story. A point Stephen has made elsewhere is to do with the Byzantine system of assigning of Factory numbers; he notes that the ones following or preceding New Order releases were often of the frivolous, arguably white elephant variety. A case in point; while FAC100 was the Low-Life LP, FAC 99 was an 'event' entitled 'Molar Reconstruction, Rob Leo Gretton's Mouth'... or, Rob went to the dentist. We are now obliged to inject a note of commerce to the story. At this juncture the band had been subsidising The Haçienda massively throughout its existence and were, perhaps unsurprisingly, beginning to tire of it.

"I think we were getting a little bit jaded," admits Stephen. "The Haçienda opened in May 1982, so really all through this there has been an undercurrent of Haçienda-ness, of money, and the Haçienda never fucking did anything else other than lose money. One of the things that for me caused a bit of resentment was 'I'm doing all this touring and it's just all going to go whoosh! straight into the fucking black hole at the end of Whitworth Street West.'"

"After you'd been in the studio all day trying to come up with a song you were having to get involved in business affairs," adds Gillian Gilbert. "Being asked, should we have hamburgers on a Thursday? You were involved in restaurants and clubs, nothing to do with music and being a band. The Haçienda was one of those things that hadn't worked, from the beginning. While everything we'd seemed to do with New Order worked, in a way."

To us on the outside of course, this patronage of the arts was practical communism, the successful band giving something back to the city that had given them life, even beyond the bounds of sanity or solvency. "That was part of Rob's personality," says Stephen. "He'd just put fucking everything into it, he'd keep on going and going and going... that was the mentality. Double or quits, until he was starkers."

Rob Gretton naked? Well, the manager who was always there, the fifth member of New Order who routinely joined in interviews, was anything but shy.

"He did it all the time," says Hooky. "He'd take his clothes off in the studio, stand on the mixing desk and scream at you, bollock naked. 'Make it go WOOOMPH!" Ha ha! 'fuckin 'ell Rob what are you doing...'

'COOOME ONNN!' like that! ha! And eventually, we would make it go woomph!"

The uniquely unorthodox, but effective, mentality at the heart of Factory and New Order can be glimpsed in this. The other member of their guiding cabal was of course Tony Wilson, the late Factory label boss and figurehead who memorably also appeared nude in his bath presenting the 1984 ITV documentary on Factory entitled Play At Home.

"He was a really encouraging and very creative person to have as the head of your record company," remembers Bernard. "He gave us a great deal of freedom. He wasn't a businessman, and that delighted us, but you need a bit of that for the finances to work. I it was more fun for us not to have responsibility, so we entrusted out responsibility to Tony and Rob. But they obviously had the same ideas as us. It was a comedy of errors really. Saying that, it was extreme fun. We did things in a different way, with freedom and fun, and it was really rewarding on a personal and creative level."

"It would have been alright it would have been the little cottage industry thing, if the Haçienda had just been a little dingy club that didn't cost much. It was the scale of it all," muses Stephen. "Compare it to something like (label co-founder) Alan Erasmus' Factory boat, for example, which was half-submerged - fine! Or the Factory car he drove into the Haçienda. He lost the keys and couldn't move it so they bricked it up, there was a fucking car in it when they knocked it down.

The Factory Zimbabwe label - another great idea! Nothing came out on it... actually, I think an Other Two single on a compilation album was on Factory Zimbabwe. Brilliant! Alan Erasmus, the voice of reason."

Despite everything, New Order would continue to perform widely, and from Brotherhood's release until December 1987 they would tour the UK, Europe, America (twice) and Australasia. We now approach an interlude in our reissue programme, August 1987's singles collection Substance having not been upgraded. Consequently, this expanded Brotherhood extends, probably artificially, our reach into 1987's seamless True Faith and Touched By The Hand Of God singles, and Quincy Jones' frenetic Blue Monday 88 remix and its flipside Beach Buggy, a number three hit in May 1988. These three no-messing chart entries reminded onlookers of a curious fact; New Order had become famous as well as popular. "All of a sudden we were a pop band," says Stephen. "Radio 1 was playing us. Things seemed slightly more optimistic. We felt like we were an established band."

And with Brotherhood reaching number 117 in America, a more successful one. But also one that was still too particular, and too idiosyncratic, to go all-out for the kind of success that required three-year long world tours and industry game playing. Hooky said it again in an interview with the NME in 1987: "We are the only truly independent band." There was, however, something bigger coming than one band's stardom. An explosion in dance music was approaching, and within the year, the sound of the moment had converged with the band's own founding principles. New Order's reply to this would be heard on 1989's masterful Technique.

Ian Harrison

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Brotherhood is the only album in the Collector's Edition Series to have its artwork substantialy reworked. Tracklisting as per Rhino publicity