Heartbreaking : Stephen Morris English Drummer Just Passed Away At the Aged of 67..see..more…

Heartbreaking : Stephen Morris English Drummer Just Passed Away At the Aged of 67..see..more…there was, was really really good. The only explanation I can come up with is that we never made that difficult third album, where people went ‘oh they used to be good, but they’re not anymore’”.

 

Joy Division – Top Ten

 

Getintothis: It’s intriguing to think what that third album would have sounded like though.

 

Stephen Morris: “That’s another thing. I don’t know, I think it was all just a slice of time and now it’s gone. What I find staggering is that a lot of young people like Joy Division but they never saw them live and there isn’t much visual reference other than still photographs. There aren’t even many colour pictures of Ian, they’re all black and white. Which is kind of how I’ve begun to remember it.

 

When I think about it, it wasn’t all black and white obviously, and they weren’t all horrible times, we were having a laugh most of the time.”

 

Getintothis: I think that comes over in all the books and features I’ve seen about you, the sense of humour that you had and the fun that you used to have on the road.

 

Stephen Morris: “The thing that gets to me is you don’t see pictures of Ian laughing, but most of the time he was , we were all having a joke. And he’s presented as a much more serious bloke than he was in reality.”

 

Getintothis: To have done all that and then to have come back as New Order, who were one of the defining bands of the 80s is an incredible achievement. Did it come naturally to change the way you did?

 

Stephen Morris: “Not naturally in that it was an evolution, because we were kind of forced into it. We had to change and we were just lucky that we managed to change successfully. We were changing anyway, with Closer we were using more keyboards and drum machines, which we ended up carrying in to New Order. But it was kind of forced upon us because we didn’t want to be Joy Division anymore, but we didn’t know anything else.

 

I didn’t want to play drums like that anymore, even though most of Movement has got tom riffs in. I thought I should just play very, very simple beats, to try to fit in with the new machines we had.

 

It wasn’t an easy thing to do. The most difficult thing was figuring what we were going to do without a singer. It took a lot of experimenting before we got to the idea of not getting Gillian in and letting Bernard do the singing.

 

But it was being able to come back from Joy Division and do something different that I felt was the most rewarding thing.

 

It was a pretty difficult process to go through. But once we’d got there, Power, Corruption and Lies was great, we got back to experimenting again. Once we’d got used to who was doing the singing, we could do that, we could get back to experimenting.”

 

And that seems like an appropriate place for us to pause our conversation, at roughly the same part as Stephen Morris’ first book also draws to a close.

 

His is a remarkable story. No other musicians have so successfully transformed themselves or have turned adversity into triumph. The back catalogue Morris and his bandmates have left behind them has no real equal. The chance to read about this all again from a fresh perspective is one that cannot be turned down.

 

Record Play Pause will be undoubtedly one of the year’s must reads.