DOWN ON THE Farm

LADS, IF you’re looking for a macho mean machine to boost your pulling power, forget about a girlie Harley-Davidson or limpwristed Porsche because the only vehicle for the rock man around town is a World War 2 tank with child locks, go-faster-stripes and rear turret-mounted Garfield as optional extras.

As well as affording you a certain just kicked crap out of a Panzer Division ruggedness, your very own personal Sherman is guaranteed to have a calming effect on over-zealous traffic wardens and provides a new concept in multi-storey parking whereby if you can’t find a vacant space, you just trundle on top of the fucker that’s already there.

“They’re not particularly fast,” enthuses Stephen Morris, “but if you got into a prang with a Mini Metro, you could put money on who’d come out best. They say that everybody goes through a trainspotterish phase at some stage in their lives and, in my case, I’ve always loved tanks. My mum delivered them in the war, which means it’s probably hereditary, and having gotten bored with radio-controlled ones, I thought it was time to move onto the real thing.

“I’d been checking the ‘Tanks For Sale’ column in the local paper but no joy and then, by chance, I was driving past this garage and there was a huge great big bloody one parked on the forecourt. It was £5,000, which was dead reasonable, so now I’m zooming round the farm myself and Gillian live on, re-enacting the Battle of the Somme. Unfortunately, the insurance makes it too expensive to drive on the roads but that’s probably just as well because I imagine all that horsepower could go to your head.

“Actually,” he confides, “I’m a bit jealous because the KLF have managed to get their hands on the armoured personnel carrier version of my tank which you can fit more people into. The Aphex Twin’s also bought one, and I was thinking perhaps we should go out on manoeuvres together.”

So, if you’re anywhere near Macclesfield and run into a scaled-down version of Desert Strike, don’t worry, it’s just Stephen and a few of his muso buddies unwinding after a hard day in the studio. Anyway, as gripping as all this tank talk might be, let’s get down to the real reason we’re sitting here with a couple of cups of tea and a plate of choccy biccies and that’s to discuss The Other Two And You, the album Stephen and his better half Gillian Gilbert have recorded in between circumnavigating the globe and generally acting the indie hero and heroine with New Order.

Anyone expecting an exercise in masturbatory self-gratification will be pleasantly surprised, the duo confining their avant garde experimentation to just one track and displaying the same slick pop moves you’d expect from the Pet Shop Boys or, dare I say it, Electronic.

“One of the drawbacks where New Order is concerned,” rues Stephen, “is that people formulate these ridiculous theories as to how and why you do stuff and 99 times out of 100, they’re completely wrong. It happened with Joy Division too and after so many years of having everything I’ve been involved in critically dissected for hidden meanings, I wanted to write loads of three minute pop songs that couldn’t be taken any other way than on face value. It was originally going to be a bit dancier but then all this road drill techno came along and we decided to go in the opposite direction.”

The Other Two And You was actually ready to roll last year but after releasing the lead single, ‘Tasty Fish’, Factory started their spectacular bellyflop into insolvency and Stephen and Gillian had to watch from the sidelines as the lawyers and accountants fought over anything that was vaguely salvageable.

“Yeah, we started on it just after Technique. What happened is that New Order got offered this soundtrack work which we promptly forgot about and when we realised we were going to have some very angry filmmakers screaming at us, myself and Gillian copped for finishing it off. Anyway, that led to more films and we thought, ‘let’s do a soundtrack album.’ Then we thought, ‘no, that’s boring. Let’s turn them into songs.’”

Were they all specially written for the project or did they misappropriate a few ideas that were intended for New Order?

“How dare you, it was the other way around! Barney had been doing Electronic, Hooky was touring with Revenge and when the idea of ‘World In Motion’ was being floated, they heard one of the tracks we’d been working on for ourselves and said, ‘right, we’ll use part of that!’. We were contemplating whether we should do another World Cup song this year but as England have failed to qualify, it’s a dead issue.”

Were any death threats uttered against the Dutch in the Morris household when Ronald Koeman – who, I hasten to add, shouldn’t have been on the pitch anyway – robbed Graham Taylor’s men of their destiny by sticking in that free-kick?

“No, I managed to keep my emotions in check. What’s weird is that I’m not a soccer fan but whenever I get asked to make predictions they’re always 100% correct. I could say, ‘oh, the Shetland Islands are going to win the European Championships’, and there they’d be in the final putting three past the Germans!

“But getting back to The Other Two And You – by the time the London deal was finalised, Pete and Bernard were ready to start recording Republic and we had to delay it yet again.”

Stephen and Gillian are currently doing their country squire bit after surviving New Order’s latest world tour with body and soul reasonably intact. The official line is that the group will get back together in 1995 to start work on what will be their seventh studio album but with Bernard Sumner seemingly more committed than ever to Electronic and Pete Hook gastering everyone’s flabber by announcing he’s joining the reformed Killing Joke, there’s a suggestion that the sabbatical may become permanent.

“Well,” splutters Stephen before dissolving into a fit of giggles, “Hooky reckons he’s going to be playing with Killing Joke but I don’t think they know about it yet!”

Perhaps, once he’s stopped splitting his sides, he’d care to elaborate?

“Er, I’d better not! What I will say is that being a member of New Order has always been a pretty existentionalist existence. We never plan things in advance, which I suppose we would do if we took it 100% seriously, and when we’ve made records and played gigs, it’s always been because we’ve wanted to rather than we’ve had to. And that’s the way it is at the moment. We haven’t agreed to meet up in 18 months time and do this, this and this. I can’t even remember how we came to start off Republic – it just happened.

“Having said that,” Stephen adds, “we’ve produced some of our best stuff when we’ve been pressurised. ‘Confusion’, for example, was basically us getting thrown into the studio with Arthur Baker in New York, not having a clue what we were going to do and having to produce a finished track by the end of the week. True Faith with Stephen Hague was a bit like that and ‘Touched By The Hand Of God’ was literally a 24 hour job. We had nothing done one morning and the girl had to go off to New York with the tape at 7 o’clock the next.”

It’s been a slow and often painful process but Republic marks New Order’s official Stateside transformation from cult heroes into multi-platinum stadium fillers with even the most conservative members of the American rock establishment taking the lads – and lass – to their corporate bosoms. How does it feel to finally have the key to the executive wash-room?

“We were always told that if we wanted to break big in America, we’d have to go out and play every godforsaken town between New York and Los Angeles and there were times when we resigned ourselves to that being the case. This tour, though, was incredibly painless. The last one nearly killed us, so we made sure there weren’t too many gigs and they were properly spread out, and together with the radio stations and MTV getting behind us, it did the trick.

“What I enjoyed about the States,” he reflects, “is that we had young kids turning up to the shows who hadn’t heard ‘True Faith’ yet alone ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. We’ve been getting letters from places like Kansas and Wyoming asking, ‘who are Joy Division and will they be coming here to tour?’. They’re not aware of the historical legacy we have to contend with at home. The reason we went through a phase of not doing interviews is that journalists kept on bringing up Joy Division, even though there was nothing left to say on the subject. That, in turn, made everyone think we’re miserable northern bastards when in fact we’re quite jovial.”

Indeed, I’m willing to offer independent confirmation that should he fall ill or drink too much Cooper’s Creosote, Stephen’s wonderfully deadpan one-liners would make him the ideal replacement for Paul Merton on Have I Got News For You. Switching to rather more serious matters – were New Order disappointed when the Peace Together gig they played in Dublin, and the initiative in general, turned out to be a bit of a damp squib?

“Yeah, it did prove to be something of an anti-climax. The original idea of doing three gigs and putting on a show of solidarity was a good one but then it just seemed to fall to pieces. Perhaps it’s because whereas you look at the African famine and it’s a cut and dry issue – ‘yes, we must send them food’ – Northern Ireland is far too involved and complicated for your average TV viewer to understand. I also suspect that it’s a little too close to home for most English people, so they blank it out.”

I remember hearing that Barney gave Pete a hard time over Electronic’s last album selling a quarter of a million copies while Revenge’s was bargain-binned almost the second it left the factory. Now that he’s made his own record, does Stephen feel the need to compete on either an artistic or commercial level with his colleagues?

“What you’ve got to remember is that we’ve been mates for a long time and if we abuse each other in print it’s either because we’re taking the piss or we had a row last night that will be forgotten about tomorrow. Human nature dictates that there’s going to be a certain amount of rivalry and one-upmanship but, no, I’m not going to burst into tears if The Other Two And You only gets to number 39 and Electronic reach number 14.”

Did he send the lads a gift-wrapped copy for Christmas or was he reluctant to let them have it in case they slagged it off?

“Bernard,” he adds with another chuckle, “heard a good few of the songs before it was released and said he liked them. I dare say Hooky’s blagged himself the CD and will tell me what he thinks when I next see him which will probably be backstage at Killing Joke!”

As proud as Stephen is of The Other Two And You's numerous pure pop moments, the track on the album he had the most fun recording was ‘Night Voices’ which borrows heavily from early 80s electropunks like DAF and Cabaret Voltaire.

“We got asked to do the music for a ‘psycho drama’ about a late night deejay played by Alexei Sayle, in a straight role for once, and came up with something that was sinister but still reasonably tuneful. The director’s reaction was, ‘no no no, we want eerie noises’, so what we did was quite literally smash up a piano, throw in a bit of Radio Moscow and he loved it.”

And will we be afforded another chance to hear The Other Two giving vent to their destructive tendencies in the studio?

“Yup, we’ve already started work on the follow-up which hopefully won’t take two years to come out this time. I’m not sure how we’re going to follow the piano trashing episode, though. Maybe we’ll do something with the tank, you know, roll over the mixing-desk.”

Failing that, Stephen, the KLF and the Aphex Twin could do us all a favour by trundling down to Crinkly Bottom and turning Mr. Blobby into Mr. Splattered-all-over-the-fucking-pavement. Wouldn't that be a great way to start the year!