New Order
‘Regret’
Highest UK Top 40 position:
#4 on April 18, 1993
1. Maybe I’ve forgotten
I’ve previously discussed the joys of being named Bernard, and I think we exhausted that subject last time. The only thing I want to add is this: people with dorky names like me have a deep, deep love for rock stars who share our name.
There aren’t many rock’n’roll Bernards, especially if you exclude people born before the war (apologies to Bernard Cribbins). You’ve basically got Bernard Edwards, founding member of Chic, and ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler.
And then there is Bernard Sumner of New Order.
Sumner tends to appear a lot in these newsletters—he popped up just last week when we talked about Sub Sub. His regular appearances are down to the fact that Sumner is a bit of a main character in music history, and a lot of threads find their way back to him eventually.
He’s also a guy who knows the importance of a good name.
2. Everyone I’ve ever known
Bernard Sumner has changed his legal name twice, yet he never ditched “Bernard” in favour of something more rock’n’roll, such as… well, literally any other name.
He was born Bernard Sumner, but his mother later remarried and the whole family took the stepdad’s name: Dicken. Which means he spent his teenage years with the name Bernard Dicken.
[Side note: when I was a kid, the most famous Bernard was golfer Bernhard Langer. “Langer” is local slang here for “penis”. A fun time for me!]
Bernard went to school in Salford, where he befriended Peter Hook, which is a proper rockstar name. Hook and Sumner started going to gigs together, which is how they ended up at perhaps the most famous gig in the history of British alternative music: The Sex Pistols at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1976.
Everyone at the Pistols show went on to start a band or record label, and Hook and Sumner were no different. They invited local weirdo Ian Curtis to be their singer and named themselves Stiff Kittens.
“Stiff Kittens” is provocative and slightly gross—in other words, a typical punk band name. But the band weren’t trying to make typical punk music. Someone in the group realised that names shape your destiny, so they looked for something that better reflected their ambitions.
The name Warsaw came from an instrumental track on Bowie’s album Low. It’s a grim, moody, industrial piece—exactly the mood that Warsaw wanted to capture.
Bernard Sumner—still legally known as Bernard Dicken—started using a stagename at this point, referring to himself as Bernard Albrecht. Bernard had misheard the name “Berthold Brecht” once, and he liked this mangled version enough to take it as his own.
Warsaw were also due for a name change. In 1978, they became Joy Division, a darkly ironic reference to Nazi atrocities. This new identity seemed to unleash something even more brutalist in the music.
Joy Division became a lightning rod for the hopelessness and despair of Generation X, but most of that energy was focused on the enigmatic Ian Curtis. Sumner, Hook and drummer Stephen Morris were background figures, creating these jagged sonic backgrounds for Curtis’s lyrics.
And then Ian Curtis killed himself.
3. Save it for another day
Joy Division became New Order, but not all at once.
They had always promised each other that Joy Division wouldn’t continue if one member left. Curtis’s death forced them to rebrand, but they were still playing Joy Division songs to a Joy Division audience. They chose not to labour the point, and the first few New Order records avoided mentioning the band’s new name entirely.
Being a Joy Division tribute band started to grate. Stephen Morris later said:
“In England, after Joy Division ceased it was like every band on the John Peel show sounded just like bloody Joy Division! It was great to inspire people to get together and make music but not to clone it. They should be trying to do something a bit different.”
The others seemed to realise that New Order would have to do something, well, new. In his autobiography, Bernard Sumner wrote:
“Our music had become so incredibly dark and cold, we couldn’t really get any darker or colder. I remember quite clearly sitting in a club in New York one night, around three or four o’clock in the morning, and thinking how great it would be if we made music, electronic music, that could be played in one of these clubs.”
This led to the real New Order, a band that sounds nothing like Joy Division (except for Hook’s unmistakable basslines).
‘Ceremony’, ‘Temptation’ and ‘Blue Monday’ all became massive hits and put some daylight between them and their gloom-rock past. The money from this success went into The Hacienda nightclub, which kickstarted the UK’s dance music revolution.
During all the popstar chaos of this time, Bernard Dicken legally changed his name back to Bernard Sumner. He’s very committed to the Bernard thing. I love that about him.
4. Look at me, I’m not you
“Literally, you’re at that point in the relationship where you hate each other’s stinking guts, and somebody says to you, ‘Would you go back together, you and him?’ and you say, ‘I would rather die’.”
By 1992, New Order were in a dire financial situation. The Hacienda was a money pit that had gobbled the profits from New Order’s only Number One hit, 1990’s ‘World In Motion’. Factory Records, the label that had put Joy Division on the map, was hanging by a thread. And the band had co-signed many of these debts, making them personally liable.
At this stage, their only valuable asset was the name New Order. New Order hadn’t released a record since 1989’s ‘Technique’, but that had been a huge hit. A new LP could generate enough cash to steady the ship.
Just one small technicality. New Order had effectively broken up.
Sumner was doing Electronic with Johnny Marr. Peter Hook had his own band, Revenge. The other two were recording as The Other Two. On the rare occasions they saw each other, they tended to have blow-out arguments.
So, Republic is an album made practically at gunpoint, which isn’t an ideal situation. By the time it was finished, the band were barely speaking, and Sumner and Hook were ready to murder each other.
And the plan didn’t even work. Factory Records was gone before Republic was finished, and no amount of cash could save The Hacienda. Nevertheless, the album was a hit, with lead single ‘Regret’ making the Top 5.
A few months later, New Order went on indefinite hiatus.
5. You were a complete stranger
New Order reunited in the 2000s and made two excellent albums, after which things turned really nasty. Peter Hook quit for good in 2006, and the band reformed without him in 2011.
Here’s where it gets complicated.
New Order used to handle their money via a limited company called Vitalturn Ltd. You can see their details on Companies House—all four members listed as directors, including Peter Hook. New Order’s revenues (from sales, publishing, merch, etc) go to Vitalturn Ltd, and Vitalturn distributes profits equally to the band members.
Vitalturn also own all of the names involved: Joy Division, New Order, and The Hacienda. If anyone wants to use these names, they need permission from Vitalturn’s directors.
When Hook went solo, he used these names in a way that seems to have pissed off the other three. I’m not sure how, exactly, although he was at one point selling Peter Hook Hacienda Bass Guitars made from the club’s old floorboards.
The other three could have slapped Hook with a Cease & Desist, but instead they did something bizarre and kind of shitty. They founded a new company called New Order Ltd.—without Peter Hook as a director. Then, they leased all of Vitalturn’s intellectual property to the new company. New Order could keep earning without paying anything to Hook.
Sound dodgy? It was! Hook took them to court, with his barrister arguing that:
“It was as though George Harrison and Ringo Starr had got together at George’s house one Friday night and had acted together to divest Paul McCartney of his shareholding in the Beatles, and didn’t tell Yoko about it either.”
The case was settled, so we don’t know exactly how things were restructured, but Hook got a lot of money which is usually an indication that you won.
Hook can’t call his band New Order, but he often points out that the other band aren’t New Order either. Strictly speaking, they’re a completely different band—they just happen to be renting the New Order name from Vitalturn Ltd.
6. I would like a place I could call my own
Names are powerful and valuable things. Obviously, they have commercial value as brands—New Order are always going to sell more tickets than Peter Hook & The Light, even though both bands essentially play the same setlist.
But names can shape the way you see the world too. Stiff Kittens could never have recorded ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, just as Joy Division could never have recorded ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’.
Maybe this is why Bernard Sumner never dropped the name Bernard. Perhaps he knows that when you find an identity that works, you need to hang onto it.
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‘Regret’ was played a lot on Virgin Radio 1215. Never been a fan of the band but I loved this song and still do. Only song by them I ever bought.