New Order's Transmissions podcast digs up wild new stories of the band – and I'm mad for it

Some stories in music you hear retold so often you wonder if there could possibly be anything left to tell. Take the legend of cult Mancunian post-punk quartet Joy Division, for example, and their phoenix-like reincarnation as hedonistic electronic art-rock trailblazers New Order. A tragi-comic chronicle recounted so many times so many different ways over the last 40 or so years it has ascended into the larger-than life stratosphere of music mythology.

Two biographical films – Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People (2002) and Anton Corbijn’s Control (2007) – each put their own spin on the fable of how four lads from Manchester became inspired by a Sex Pistols concert in 1976 to form a band whose steely, gloomy sound would echo forever.

Both films go on to show how, following the suicide of singer Ian Curtis in 1980, the three surviving Joy Division members – guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris – reassembled together with keyboardist Gillian Gilbert to begin again as a group arguably even more groundbreaking.

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There have been books by all from Hook to Curtis’s widow Deborah Curtis and journalist Paul Morley, as well as innumerable TV and radio documentaries. Because I can’t seem to get enough of this kind of thing, I recently finished listening to the podcast Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy Division and New Order. Deeply researched and lovingly constructed by production company Cup & Nuzzle, it gave me more fresh insight than I could have anticipated.

A lot tends to get lost in all the merry mythmaking around two of Manchester’s finest bands – much of it seeded by the silver-tongued devilry of their storied label boss, Factory Records’ Tony Wilson. Chiefly, the specifics of New Order’s rise to briefly becoming one of the most important bands on the planet. A tale so outlandish, wonderful and hilarious it scarcely needs creative embellishment. 

The first season of Transmissions spanned the Joy Division years through New Order’s 1983 breakout with the epochal single Blue Monday. Narrated by Maxine Peake and including superstar fan reflections from the likes of Bono and Liam Gallagher, it arrived in autumn 2020. But it’s the podcast’s second season, four long years in the making, narrated by journalist Elizabeth Alker and featuring guests including Johnny Marr, Billy Corgan and Neil Tennant, which I’ve found the more entertaining and illuminating.

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It focuses album-by-album on New Order’s wildest years from 1985’s Low-Life through to 1989’s Technique. Freshly signed to Quincy Jones’ Qwest Records in America, we meet a band beset by impostor syndrome – four fumbling punks unsure how they suddenly ended up thrust into expensive studios with superstar producers, led by a singer in Sumner who only became a frontman because of his friend’s death, yet who wouldn’t shirk from the challenge no matter how much it terrified him.

New Order’s was, as one contributor puts it, “body music” of the finest order – huge, 1980s-defining hits rendered of pure creative intuition. All feeling, minimal thought, destined for dancefloors being re-defined by new music and new drugs. Any deficit of deep-thinking on the band’s part was compensated for by Cambridge-educated, Situationist-obsessed intellectual Wilson and Factory’s genius graphic designer Peter Saville, who between them cloaked everything New Order did in a priceless veneer of arty mystique. 

But beneath it all, to borrow from the future popular vernacular of Manchester, New Order were absolutely mad for it. Whether raiding the New York club scene for inspiration, drunkenly crashing cars in Ibiza or bussing their pals crowd down from up north for an almighty party at Peter Gabriel’s bucolic luxury studio, one epic sesh after another is sheepishly recalled, to the best of anyone’s memory.

Manchester’s acid house mecca the Haçienda, the legendary nightclub which New Order owned and squandered so much money bankrolling, is conventionally portrayed as a dead weight around the band’s neck. In Transmissions it’s reconsidered as their way of paying forward the windfall they reaped from a flurry of sales following Curtis’s death, by endowing the city with the temple of bacchanalian excess it deserved. 

The final episode gifts us the colourful mental image, drawn by comedian Keith Allen with a little too much glee, of Sumner hoovering up some drugs before being sick in a Boots carrier bag in the back of Wilson’s Jaguar, en route to the studio to record England’s Italia ’90 World Cup anthem World In Motion.

It’s with that song, New Order’s only number one – “the last straw for Joy Division fans” as Sumner called it – that the second season of Transmissions ends, the band having driven a punk rock Trojan horse into the heart of British popular culture and transformed it for the better. By then they were passing their creative pinnacle, and barely able to stand the sight of one another anymore.

The door is left ajar to a third season, spanning the deaths of Wilson and New Order’s longtime manager Rob Gretton, the closure of Factory and the Haçienda, and the further five studio albums the band have made since 1993. But it would need to cover some problematic ground – chiefly the enormous bust up that pushed Peter Hook out of New Order, probably for good. There are parts of even the best stories perhaps better left untold.

Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy Division and New Order is available on podcast platforms.

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