6/5/2023 0 Comments Barney anyway you slice itWe put sheep on Fine Time, which was on another album. We bought an Emulator, and we put frogs on that one. The Perfect Kiss was a bit like Blue Monday, where we just stuck all the bits that we liked together. Love Vigilantes was a little bit about the war in the Falklands, our sort of country & western song, and another one where I did the bass line of the track – one of my first real songwriting things. Bernard didn’t like doing vocals in the rehearsal rooms, so a lot of the time he used to jam the words at a concert and just come up with a bridge, and then we’d listen back to the gig and pick which words we wanted to take to the studio – we’d pick bits of all the lyrics and then write the missing gaps. So, I think that was one of my first moments of “Oh, I’ve done two notes!” It was like, “Oh, what did you play there, Gillian?” I said a C and an F, and he was like, “Ooh.” And then it all took off from there. Those jams meant everybody playing at once in our rehearsal studio, which Hooky liked doing. We used to record our jams, which is how we worked. I remember I did two notes on that bass line on Age of Consent and I was pretty pleased because we used to record everything on a four-track. That was the backdrop of Movement, of going to London to record after we’d done a bit in Manchester. You looked through the windows and you could see and hear all this rioting. The Brixton riots were going on outside the studio when we were recording Movement, and that was pretty frightening. I think he sort of got round to thinking, “Well, it is their first record and with Ian dying …” I think it was hard for him to work with us, but I thought everything he did was wonderful. But then, when we went to London to do Movement, I think he wasn’t really into producing New Order. So I went in with Martin, and I couldn’t believe how he made you play the same thing over and over again. The idea was to get me on to play Ceremony because that was the end of the Joy Division songs. New Order in 1985, clockwise from top left: Stephen Morris, Peter Hook, Gillian Gilbert and Bernard Sumner. So then, when I came back to New Order, Barney was like, “I can’t get my voice to go high enough – can you change the key?” I knew what to do. I got to learn about reading music and doing the keys. I thought if I did lessons, it might ruin things, but I ended up doing piano lessons first, and I did that with my mum, and she loved it. Only Stephen knew about music because he did drum lessons, but Bernard and Hooky were self-taught, so they had their own style. But I got that Bontempi organ and learnt all the songs that New Order had already written before I joined. I just played guitar – my uncle taught me, and we used to do that on weekends when I stayed with them in Manchester. She’s very good at music, was in a brass band, and played clarinet. But they said, “Well, we’ve got some keyboard parts.” So, I got my sister’s Bontempi organ out. I was a bit daunted because they were obviously songwriting, and I couldn’t play keyboards at all, and I thought I’d just play guitar. I did one year there, and I thought, “I can’t ask my mum and dad if I can go off with this band.” I thought they’d never let me go, but they surprised me. When I got asked to join New Order, I was at Stockport College doing graphic design. I thought they’d teach me to write songs, but the more I got to know about songwriting, the more I could do it myself. I didn’t really know much about songwriting, so it was a bit daunting, and they were calling me “the apprentice”. Especially being a woman, I think it was an appealing idea.
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