8. New Order - Everything's Gone Green (Factory)

 

Number one for three weeks from 10^th October 1981

Note – this was technically a double A-side with “Procession”, but the NME chart only listed “Everything’s Gone Green”, so that’s what we’ll be focussing on.

So, there was this thing called punk rock, and that was very important… and also this band from Manchester who emerged from punk rock, but were financed by a newsreader, and overcame tragedy when… and you probably know this already… but... oh fuck it.

It’s unprofessional of me not to begin this entry with the backstory of New Order. The problem is it would feel either cliche-ridden or strange to bother. Who is reading this right now who doesn’t know their story, or about Ian Curtis’s suicide, or the legend of Factory records? Even the most poorly programmed AI bot in the world could spew that stuff back at you to perfection.

If I had something new to add to the thousands of pieces of work out there (not least a whole motion picture) I could try, but by this point my angle remains as typical and as factual as any Wikipedia entry. So you’ll hopefully forgive me for not starting right at the beginning, for not mentioning Warsaw, The Sex Pistols, Tony Wilson doing regional news on the television, or any of that hoopla. There are ways out of this jammy fix, admittedly; if I wanted this entry to be both original and clickbait friendly I could claim that it was all over-puffed and silly and everyone involved should be regarded as a footnote in any story about British independent music, especially while Toyah Willcox had records out at the same time and was higher up in the actual proper grown-up charts, but I’m not here to play those games.

Except… what can get overlooked in the aftermath of Joy Division is how confused New Order initially seemed. Their debut single “Ceremony” was a recording of an unreleased Joy Division song issued after Curtis’s death, and sounds exactly as you would expect – a continuation of the story rather than any kind of new project. If other groups had been faced with a similar situation, it could also have acted as a full stop, a short tribute before everyone agreed that nothing would ever be the same again and all went their separate ways. That would have provided a way out which would have denied New Order years of trauma at live shows as punters cried out for Joy Division songs which were too painful for the band to perform.

It was not to be, though. “Everything’s Gone Green” – named after a flippant, stoned remark in a recording studio – followed and sounds like the first true New Order single, the one where they’ve found a voice which isn’t purely an imitation of Ian Curtis’s, and yet it’s a strange, uncomfortable hybrid, at moments sounding like a rough 1977 Giorgio Moroder demo of a remix of an unfinished Joy Division song.

In the jokey IPC comics I was bought as a child, the future of all factories and technology was usually portrayed in slightly overblown and monstrous ways, often featuring giant metallic robotic crab shaped machines who tinned food, built cars or even operated on people. The people in these comic strips would generally be cowed by the shiny beast, quivering in corners, stammering or insisting that it was out of control and everyone concerned should step away from it. In “Everything’s Gone Green”, New Order are those visitors to an evil genius’s factory, backed into a corner, surrendering nervously to the electronics but not surfing their waves entirely successfully. The pulsing nature of this single seems like an unnatural fit at certain moments; they sound swamped in places, and in others just a fraction of a beat behind the mechanical precision. The ending is the most revealing aspect; the machines get the last word via some polite digital burbling, not the group.

1. Discharge - Why? (Clay Records)

 

Number One from 18th May 1981 for two weeks

Back in the early nineties a label called Connoisseur Collection issued a series of thoughtfully compiled records called “The Indie Scene”. Each documented a year in the life of British independent labels, and while it was occasionally guilty of inauthenticity (even the most liberal definition of “indie” shouldn’t include The Stranglers releases on United Artists) the booklets were enthusiastically written and informative, and some of the CDs contained material which had been unavailable in a digital format before.

Despite this, missing from these compilations was any kind of (even passing) reference to the early eighties punk scene. Whether this was due to rights issues or master tape problems is a question, but cynical old me suspects that it was probably because those bands didn’t fit the narrative, despite their overwhelming popularity in underground terms. I can imagine the conversations in the office – “Post punk? Definitely, that’s going in. Industrial? Of course. Synth pop? Well, we can hardly leave Mute out of the story. Hardcore Punk? Forget it. Nobody is going to buy these compilations to listen to one minute and thirty seconds of a man grunting and raging against the failings of a supposedly liberal Western society while a group thrash away behind him”.

Whether my assumptions are correct or not, I generally feel the rush of enthusiasm for these releases has been wiped out of indie history. It fits the story in one respect, in that all these groups were operating outside the mainstream, had a distinct sound, passion and purpose, and were sometimes played by John Peel, but they certainly don’t neatly fit the preferred mainstream BBC 6 Music narrative, the backwards looking one with its tidy cuts and edits to the messy edges of the story.

In addition, punks in general had a significantly reduced visibility by the early eighties. They were still apparent, but seemed to have become more of a small town phenomenon; similar to the way in which you don’t see motorcycle gangs in urban areas anymore but one miraculously emerges as soon as you take a day trip to Cheddar, punks now seemed to have become a phenomenon of the bored suburbs and strange between-city outposts rather than the troubled estates.

At the time, I noticed the graffiti “Punk’s Not Dead” popping up in odd places (we’ll come back to this slogan again in good time) which even as an eight year old I understood wasn’t a good sign. People don’t tend to walk around protesting something’s not dead if it’s obviously in rude health. When our neighbour told us that her Dad was still alive, it was only because this seemed like a miraculous fact given his health woes, not because he had taken up tap dancing.

Punk, though, had both infected other genres and itself splintered into many different factions and forms. The Oi scene, championed and promoted by future tabloid superhack Gary Bushell, seemed to imagine an alternate universe where Sham 69 were the artistic champions of the movement and not The Clash or The Pistols. Then other “punk pathetique” groups like Splodgenessabounds and Peter and the Test Tube Babies occupied the gleefully childish fringes of the movement, as if they had decided that refusing to act like a grown up and celebrating, rather than railing against, the daft trivialities of daily life was one of the most anarchic and free-spirited things a human being could still do (I might be inclined to agree with them).

Then there was hardcore punk, though how long it took before anybody actually referred to it as such in the UK is open to question. Bushell didn’t seem to talk as enthusiastically about those bands, though he certainly gave them space. They were harder, heavier, nastier and, for all their relative musical amateurism, more Metal than the first wave of British punk bands.

Stoke-on-Trent’s Discharge were pioneers of the British movement, and the “Why?” EP shows us how they did it. It’s akin to Wire’s earliest work in that each song is a short, mean stab which doesn’t take up more time than it has to – the EP consists of ten tracks but is over in less than twenty minutes. Completely unlike any of Wire’s work, however, this is persistently, relentlessly harsh, a distorted and furious cacophony which barely stops for breath. Cal Morris’ vocals practically invent the doomy guttural chant of modern metal, while the group surge, clatter and charge behind him.