Guest
Note some of this footage was shot for the Love Will Tear Us Apart Video. Hooky states - We’d arranged to film it in T. J. Davidson’s, even though we weren’t really using it any more. Looking for more basic comforts we’d ended up in Pinky’s near Broughton Baths (quite near North Salford Youth Club, actually, the second youth club I ever went to, with Barney; I got chased away from the first, South Salford) but it wasn’t big enough to make the video. Now, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that we hated the whole idea of a video where you mimed or acted to the track. In fact we were never into it, all through New Order. God, you feel like such an idiot miming. So what we decided to do was hire a PA and a mixing desk, play ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and record while we filmed, so the video would be a live performance of the song. We set up for the filming with a long runway so the cameras could come in and out on a track, like a mini-railway. Then off we went and did a few run-throughs, trying to get the sound right. But we couldn’t, because there wasn’t a separate room in which to mix the sound. It was confused with the racket that we were getting off the instruments and through the amps. It didn’t really work, and the tape we ended up with, the soundtrack to the video, sounded pretty rushed and bad, to be honest. Nor could we overdub any backing vocals – or anything else, for that matter. Even so, we were very happy with it as it happened. It was raw, dirty and arty. We liked that: it was us all over, of course. As usual it never really occurred to us that anybody else might have a problem with it. If they did, well, that was their problem. Trouble was, hardly anybody we sent it to would play it. It got shown a little, but not nearly as much as we’d hoped, so it had seemed a bit of a waste of time. Ah, but then we heard that it had gone down well in Australia, and of course we thought, Good on the Aussies. They’ve got good taste, they have. They know art when they hear it. And thus began an affection for our like-minded brethren down under. It wasn’t until years and years later that we visited Australia – as New Order, of course – and discovered the truth. Somebody at the Australian record company had simply laid the actual record over the film, and it wasn’t even properly synchronised. It looked well dodgy, actually – well, we thought so. But this became the version that ended up being the ‘official’ (for want of a better word) version. Now of course it’s perfect, capturing us at our youngest and freshest with a great soundtrack.
