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Tag Team Vs. New Order (R.I.P.)

Foreword by Matt Kagler

Anyone who knows the brothers Kagler knows that we are seriously rabid New Order fans and any sentient being worth their musical salt knows that New Order, somewhat reluctantly, called it quits late last spring after Peter Hook officially left the band. When Marc and I heard the news, we both took a little time off from our day jobs as music industry douchebags and began to wax nostalgic (ad nausium) via email about our relationship with the band’s music and its effect on our childhoods/ the way we view pop music in general…yeah, we’re both a little obsessive, pathetic, and sentimental when it comes down to it. As a matter of fact, nothing I can think of captures my thoughts on New Order better than the following mail I received from Marc just after the band officially called it quits:

Hey Dude,

As I'm sure you’ve heard, our beloved New Order finally broke up for good last week. Here is by far the raddest document I could find re: the band. This clip of Age of Consent, recorded at BBC studios in 1984, is everything I love about those guys: passionate, despondent, sloppy, angry and brilliant all at the same time…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VcGJZpfl1c

A memory of mine that will stay with me till the day I die is when I woke up one Saturday morning at the age of 11, turned on the TV at 6am and saw that MTV was going to play the Perfect Kiss video. We were living in Oceanside, California for the summer and I immediately put a blank VHS tape into the machine and recorded that Demme video. Later that morning, you and I went around to all our friend’s houses and showed it as this HUGE badge of honor. This YouTube video brought that experience back home to me. This is how I want to remember the most important band of my life...Steven keeping time, Gillian doing whatever she does, Hooky looking confused but stubborn, and Barney wearing white shorts playing nonsense and singing beautifully out of tune. It's the soundtrack to my childhood...my standard for how daring music can be...how stupidity so eloquently transforms into the sublime...to me, New Order customized musical juxtaposition:

New Order is disco...
New Order is punk...
New Order is electronic...
New Order is hip hop...
New Order is rave...
New Order is rock...
New Order is emo...
New Order is Tony Wilson's wet dream...
New Order is...only who they want to be...so fuck you

-Marc


Ok, so Marc probably threw back a few Coors Lights or whatever when he sent that mail at 2:30 in the morning, but you get the idea…my brother and I are full-on nerds who are basically inches away from spending our life savings on Magic: The Gathering cards and obscure German imprint Smiths 7” singles…just kidding that’d be Kyle.

Moving along, a couple of years back, Marc and I actually got the chance to interview Bernard Sumner for a piece Marc was writing for Under the Radar on New Order’s latest album, Waiting for the Sirens Call. As I recall, we were both pretty excited/ nervous about the whole thing, but as you’ll see below, the interview turned out alright and Sumner was actually a pretty nice dude, despite reports we’d heard to the contrary.

A few things of note before you read ahead: The Bernard phoner was conducted at something like 3:00am Beijing time and I had been out all night doing a dj set with Ian Sherman at an early incarnation of Tag Team’s Indie Night over at The Black Sun (shithole!), so by the time I got home and made the ‘pre-interview’ call to Marc over at the Rhino offices in LA, I was pretty much ‘feeling’ the 6 or 7 vodka-tonics I put away while making an ass of myself in the dj booth. Marc’s been a staff writer for Under the Radar since 2001 and interviews bands all the time, so he knows what he’s doing for the most part. As a label-guy, I will admit to having a bit of experience dealing with bands and media, but I had honestly never been on that side of an interview in my entire life, especially with a member of a band I spent my entire childhood worshiping + I had consumed the afore mentioned 6 or 7 cocktails and I’ll go ahead and cop to it…3 or 4 beers as well. I guess what I’m getting at is:

Nervous + Drunk = Maybe NOT the best time to conduct interview via telephone w/ larger than life figure in your mind.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the interview. Gulp. Next time Marc decides to include me in something of this nature I’ll try not to do it after a dj set/ copious amounts of cocktails…or not. Apologies to Marc, Bernard and Under the Radar. Ok, I’m off to rehab now, see you all in like 3 months or so…

Under the Radar Interview Transcription

New Order
02/24/05

Member Interviewed: Bernard Sumner (BS) – vocals/programming/founding member

UTR Interviewers:
Marcus Kagler (MK)
R. Matthew Kagler (RK)

Note: Interview takes place over the phone as a conference call between Matthew Kagler in Beijing, China, Marcus Kagler in Los Angeles, and Bernard Sumner in New York City.

MK: Hi, my name is Marcus Kagler. I’m a writer for a magazine called Under the Radar and I’m calling to speak with Bernard Sumner please.

BS: You got him.

MK: Great. Thanks so much for doing this with us Bernard we really appreciate it.

BS: No problem.

MK: How has the press junket been going?

BS: Emm…there’s been a lot of it. [we laugh]

MK: I would imagine so. I’m on the line here with a counterpart of mine who also happens to be my older brother. He is helping me out with this fairly large piece that we are doing on you guys. His name is Matt.

BS: Hi Matt.

RK: Hey Bernard, how’s shit in New York?

BS: Emm..It’s gone grey this morning, pretty miserable really and I’ve got a fairly sizeable hangover.

RK: That’s cool, it’s cold as shit here in Beijing tonight and I’m sure I’ll have a pretty rad hanger tomorrow as well.

MK: [we laugh] Matt is calling from China right now.

BS: China?!

RK: Yep.

BS: Wow!

RK: Anyway, I’m going to lead off with a question Bernard. As New Order recordings go Sirens’ seems extremely organic on the whole, like you all really meshed during the recording process. What was the atmosphere like in the studio?

BS: It was good. I mean, we wrote the album in two different ways. We started off writing by jamming together. Steve our drummer has got a studio at his house. It’s an old barn. He lives on a farm and…emm…he moved all the animals out of the barn. That was a joke. And he moved us into it. We just started off by jamming together and when we got about 8 or 9 songs that way decided to switch the computers on and the synthesizers and start to write the songs in a programmed way. We didn’t want to do it all in one way. We wanted to take a couple of different approaches so we would end up with variation on the album. The atmosphere was really good cause we all sort of respect each other now and get on with each other much better. I mean, we always did actually until about 1993 when we did Republic and I think the problem was two fold. One was that we were kind of burnt out from touring because we were bad boys on tour and we did all the things you shouldn’t do and we drank too much and did too much of this and too much of that and stayed up too late and were pretty, sort of, hedonistic really. Obviously, anyone with that kind of life style it will eventually wear you down. Also at the same time our record company in England was spending too much money really and it wasn’t being run in a vey business like manner and our nightclub the Hacienda had it’s own problems. We had business problems and we had problems with gun violence over there. It all got a bit too much to put it in a nutshell.

RK: That sounds about right. Did you guys keep a tight recording schedule or was it more relaxed? I know all of you have made a few…uhhh...lifestyle changes over the past couple of years. Was it tense in the studio? Did you just bang it out? How did it work?

BS: No, we had a good time in the studio really. It wasn’t tense at all. I think the initial phase of recording was at Steve’s place. We kind of did demo’s there. We moved to a residential studio where we all lived together and it was actually an old Tudor mansion that Henry VIII built for one of his illegitimate daughters and it’s just outside Bathe and it belongs to an actress named Jane Seymour. We rented the house off her and just filled it with recording equipment. It was great. It was a bit spooky but it was really good. Basically when we were recording like that we would wake up in the morning, have our breakfast, and go straight into the studio and work all day for about 12 or 14 hours and then do the next thing the same day. Cause the quicker we work the sooner we get back home to see our families.

MK: Now, I spoke at length this past week with John Leckie and Stephen Street. Actually, a side note, Stephen Street asked me to give you a message. He says he’s going to try and contact you this weekend.

BS: I’ll be sure and turn my phone off. [laughs]

MK: Anyway, both of them kind of described you as the main songwriter for the band. Did you have any goals as a songwriter for this particular record? Anything that was different and wasn’t on previous New Order releases?

BS: I don’t think I’m the main songwriter because everybody contributes on a New Order record. I think I’m a bit of an oracle that people consult really when people have got problems with the tracks. I think that’s more of the case because I hope to believe that I’m pretty fair and pretty unbiased. I’ve not got an ego really. Not much of an ego really in the studio. So people turn to me sometimes like an oracle. Sorry what was the rest of the question?

MK: Oh, is there anything that you wanted to do that was different and wasn’t on previous releases?

BS: Yeah, there was yeah. What Hooky really likes is jamming and he gets all his stuff by jamming. Even if the tracks been written he jams along with the track and does loads of takes of bass to edit down. That’s the way Hooky likes writing so it’s very important to write in that way for Hooky’s sake, and Steve as well. I particularly don’t like jamming. I find it a bit boring really. A bit tedious because you might jam for like an hour and get like ten seconds of stuff out of that, fifteen seconds. It drives me bat listening back to the playback of all the rubbish we’d been playing. [laughs] But I can see the value cause we’ve written some great songs out of jamming. Regret for example came out of a jam. So I think it’s really important and important for Hooky. But we got about 8 or 9 songs written that way and then we switched the computers on and synthesizers. Sometimes I would write some stuff at home, and I do most of the keyboards and always have done, and I sometimes take a track home and I’ll write the basic track and then I’ll get Hooky, Steve and Phil, our new guitarist to play on the track. And when they’ve played on it I take it home and write the vocal at home. I think I was trying to write in a different way. I was looking for kind of fresh ways of writing rather than just sitting down and hitting it pretty hard. One of the tracks that was quite experimental was I Told You So, which is kind of a reggae influenced track.

RK: This is the one you wrote after your experience on a yachting trip around the Caribbean?

BS: I’m sorry I can’t hear you very well.

RK: Yeah, I’ve also got an echo the size of Texas. I think the track you are referring too…didn’t you write it after taking a trip around the Caribbean in your yacht or something?

BS: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I was…umm…I’ve not got a yacht in the Caribbean? I’m not that wealthy. I just rent a yacht over there. When I go on holiday I tend to go on holiday on a boat because I spent the last 25 years of my career staying in a hotel so I’ve got an instinct to dislike hotels. So was sailing around from island to island on the Caribbean and I took a short wave radio with me, and a minidisk recorder, and I recorded a load of transmissions from the different islands and a lot of short wave radio noise. You know, you get the weird short wave radio sound where it splits radio sounds up into harmonics and you get this strange harmonic ripping sound.

RK: That’s awesome. Phil says in the writing process you tend to throw away things that sound too “New Order-y”. That you like to keep things really fresh. Is it difficult not to rip yourself off when everybody right now in 2005 is totally ripping off New Order?

BS: [laughs] Yeah.

RK: It’s funny, I was in LA the other day with Marc and we heard the intro to the new Arcade Fire single on Indie 101 and initially thought it was True Faith. Those dudes should send you a Hallmark card that reads something like, “Dear New Order, Thanks for letting us borrow whole bass lines and keyboard parts for our new record. Love, Arcade Fire”

BS: [laughs] I’ll have to get my lawyers to speak to them right away, maybe I can afford that yacht after all!

RK: [laughs] So I guess another question is: do you get anything out of new bands these days? Is there anything you are inspired by?

BS: Yeah, well, last Thursday we played in London. We played at the NME Awards and there was loads of new band there. Franz Ferdinand and the Killers. At the moment, I think my favorite new band are the Killers. I really like the Killers.

RK: Really? Ouch!

BS: I do…yeah. I think they’re pretty good.

MK: After twenty-five years of being in New Order do you feel the band is creatively rejuvenated?

BS: Emmm…[pause]…It’s not really a question of that it’s just a question of working really hard. That’s how we achieve results. I don’t think any of us were born…there’s two types of musicians. There are musicians who are born with a gift really. You know I worked a lot with Johnny Marr and Johnny can just pick up a guitar and play anything. Just always has been able to do so. And there are other musicians who aren’t born with a gift and have to really, really bloody work hard to get results. But I believe that if you can…if you are passionate about music and you buy music and you’re really, really into it then you can, with a little patience and a little work you can reverse that process and redirect that love of music into writing music really, instead of listening to it. I always found when I was a kid, when I was listening to music, I’d go, “That bit could be better. That bit should go like this or that guitar solo should have used this.” So I just kind of reversed that process really to become a musician. But we achieve what we achieve just by working really hard. I think, as well, just by luck we work together very well. It’s a good combination of people and it’s just really good. You know, the way Steve plays drums, the way I play guitar and sing, and the way Hooky plays his bass obviously, and with Phil it’s just an interesting combination that we make a good sound as a band.

RK: Do you think you’re relationship with your band mates gotten better as you’ve gotten older or do you think you had a better musical relationship when you guys were younger?

BS: I’ve always been aware that some of my musical hero’s, when I was a teenager, that as they got older and perhaps wealthier, that the music’s become boring and actually not very good. I won’t name any names but some of the most innovative artists of the 70’s are now, sort of, making boring records. I’ve always been aware of that and conscious that I don’t want that to happen to New Order. I’d say the truth is we actually work twice as hard now than when we started out. When you write your first album it comes very freely. We wrote our first album when I was 22 years old and it was in there bursting to come out. So the first one came very easy. The second one came very easy and then you get on the treadmill of playing concerts, promoting your album. You get on that treadmill and the albums get tougher. But as they get tougher, to compensate for that you just have to work harder and be aware that as you’re getting old watch out for the boring old farts out there that you don’t won’t to be. That your music doesn’t become boring and that you don’t become complacent and think everything’s easy ‘cause it’s never easy.

MK: Stephen Street told me that you guys recorded quite a few songs and there are a lot of songs that didn’t make it on the record. Will the public be able to hear those songs? Will those songs be on future releases?

BS: Yeah. What we decided was that we had actually recorded two albums. We need another two songs and then the second album is finished and the rest of the material that we didn’t put on this album is already mixed and on the shelves. Yeah, so we’re going to release that in probably a year and a half’s time.

RK: Will you guys use the same producers, different producers? Or will you do it yourselves?

BS: One of the tracks we did for this next album we did with Troy Johanson, who’s worked with Franz Ferdinand. I think we definitely would work with Steven and John again. We really got on with them. They were great. I think the other two tracks, I mean we’ve got a couple of backing tracks already, but I think we’ll probably do them with Stephen cause we got on with him so well, and John we got on with as well.

MK: That’s great. I just wanted to get into just a few of the songs on the record and just ask you what they are about and how they came about really. One of the tracks that really stuck out for me was the track Turn. It reminded me of something off Technique really. How did that one come about?

BS: Emmm…[pause]…Oh, Gosh. Bloody hell, you’re asking me now? Remember we’d been working on 18 songs. I can’t remember any particular one. It’s quite difficult. I think it just came from a jam really. Yeah, it was just a jam. It was one of the earlier one’s that came out.

RK: Do you think it sounds a little like Dream Attack? Sort of like the last song on Technique?

BS: It does. It sort of reminds me a bit of Technique. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing really...right?

RK: Fuck no!. That’s like one of our favorite records of yours! Hey, I once read you saying something like, “One needed a University degree in clubbing in order to keep up with today’s party scene.” and I thought that was pretty funny. How do you feel contemporary New Order music, remixes or otherwise, fits into today’s club scene?

BS: Well what I meant was dance music is fragmented into so many different factions that unless you are obsessive about it, it’s hard to keep up with all the factions you know. I’m quite old fashioned I must admit. I mean, when we wrote Blue Monday, dance music meant a record you could dance to and that’s still the way I see things. On the last record there weren’t any dance tracks and it’s because…there are a couple of reasons really. One was, I was baffled by all these different genres. The other reason was that we’d not played together for five years. So I didn’t want to sit down at a computer programming a dance tune for days on end while the rest of the band were just scratching their heads. I think it was important that we gelled together on Get Ready as a unit and everyone was involved in every minute of the record and we all played together and no one got ignored. To cement this good feeling had between the band. But after Get Ready we went out and we played live and when we played the dance tunes and we saw the response from the audience, either they started dancing to them or they really got into them, we thought that this was an important aspect of New Order that we shouldn’t ignore on the next album, i.e. this album. So we made a conscious effort early to include some dance tunes on the album, and what we did with the genre problem was that we just completely ignored it.

RK: Do you guys hand pick who remix’s all of your singles these days or is it all just the label? Do you have any preferences?

BS: No, we don’t. Again, we don’t got our head in the dance/remixer world really. So we left it to the record company on this one. I’m happy with some of them but unhappy with some of them. I think they could be better really. They’re alright, they aren’t brilliant. I think they could be better. But some of them are alright. Some of the are alright. But we left it up to the record company. You’ll have to ask them about that one. [laughs] If you think about it we spent seven months, just before Christmas making the album. So we were out of touch for seven months. I mean, in those seven months we were working on music for so long I didn’t even play any music. You know, when you finish and you did a 12 or 14 stint in the studio the last thing you want to do is play some music. So we worked right up until Christmas Eve and we saw our children and our girlfriends and wives and then on the 5th of January, which is the day after my birthday, we couldn’t do it on the 4th cause that was my birthday, we started promotion and since the 5th of January I’ve been doing promotion none stop. Actually I was told yesterday that if we wanted to we could do promotion for a whole year. But I kindly declined the offer. [we laugh] So all we’ve doing really is recording and doing promotion so you don’t have time to go to a club and check out what good remixes are out there. You’ve not got inclination to even play music cause you either talkin’ about it all day or playing it all day. So when I stop doing this I tend to not want to talk to anyone and read a book…or watch a movie…or go out and get drunk like I did last night.

MK: Right on. I was surprised with this record because I had read you wanted to make this album a little more dance-y, a little more electronic but this seems to be, probably, the most guitar heavy record you guys have made.

BS: Well, just to let you know, we wanted to make part of the record a little more dance-y and a little more electronic. I think it’s like I Told You So is a pretty dance-y although it does got guitars on it. That’s the one that starts up with like a reggae influenced beat. Then there is Jetstream and Guilt Is A Useless Emotion and Morning Night and Day is pretty groovy really. So I think that’s four tracks really.

RK: Being that this record is pretty dance-y to some degree are you going to tour the hell out of it or take it easy?

BS: We’re going to tour, we’ve already agreed to do ten festivals. We’re playing Coachella. I think we finalized a date in San Francisco, we’re going to play with the Chemical Brothers. They are great friends of ours. We talking a date in Chicago and we’re talking about a date in New York but I don’t think we’ll be doing the old 30 day tour again.

RK: I know in the past you have been really reticent to tour and that touring took a lot out of you. What is your attitude towards playing live and touring now?

BS: Emm…well, there is much less self abuse going down I can assure you. We took the drugs out of the situation completely, and we took quite a lot of the alcohol out of the situation but not all of it. Let’s us not forgot the reasons for living you know. But the problem there is it really separates you from your family. Like I’ve got a two year old little boy and I’ve already spent all in all about 8 or 9 months will only seeing him at the weekends. The problem with touring is it takes you away from your family and I don’t want to be an absentee father.

MK: So getting back to the guitars on the record would you say a lot of the guitar heaviness on the record is due to Phil Cunningham?

BS: Some of it yeah. It’s funny because probably the most guitar heavy track is the last track on the record, which is Working Overtime, and everybody thinks it’s Phil but it’s not. It’s actually me on that track. [laughs] Phil’s a bit of a rocker yeah. He’s a bit of a rocker but he’s fit in really well with us. We got Phil when we were playing live on the last album. You see, what’s happened in the past is I wrote the guitar and keyboards and pretty much like 95% of it and I would then have to write the lyrics. So we’d write songs, usually about 3 songs, then I would take the tracks home and work on the vocals for 3 songs, which could take me about 2 weeks and during those two weeks the band would have to stop cause they didn’t have anyone to jam with really cause I was working on the lyrics obviously. But what happened on this album is when I went off to work on the vocal they’ve carried on jamming with Phil. So I’d come back and they’d go, “Hey, there’s another song here.” And I would be like, “Cheers guys. I really want to be locked up in a room on my own working on vocals.” So I’d go work on another song, come back and they’d have another idea and I would play some guitar on that idea and take it away. So it was a bit of a conveyer belt really and that’s why we ended up with 18 songs. So Phil has been writing with us and it’s been great. Really great.

RK: Do you feel like it’s easier to write lyrics now rather than say 10 years ago?

BS: No, it’s just different. In the past…[pause]…I’m a pretty happy and contented person now but in the past I had my problems. I had relationship problems and I had problems within my family of illness. A lot of my family in my teenage years died of various illnesses. You know, there were a lot of things happening there with my family and the community in which we lived. It was totally destroyed by the local city…you know, chiefs. You know, the community was dissipated. So I had issues in the past and when you’ve got problems or issues you tend to try and sort them out in your writing. So it was kind of therapeutic writing. So in the past my writing would have been about myself and my problems but now I’m a kind of more contented person. But that tends to make it a little more difficult to write songs. I tend now to write about the outside world and people I know and maybe fictitious characters that I make up and maybe a story about something you know.

RK: Do you make the stories up or do you write about things you see or experience in everyday life?

BS: Well, the way I write is I write the song and then decide what the song is about afterwards. It’s kind of done subconsciously.

MK: I know you said you pretty much have another record in the can but for future New Order releases is there any experimental direction you would like to take or that you’ve been thinking about?

BS: Emm…as you’ve grown older as a musician and you kind of know how to write songs and how to play your instrument it becomes harder and harder to experiment. You have to force yourself to do it. At one stage we were talking to Brian Eno about doing a track with him. He had an idea of using some kind of trigger pads that he’s invented. He kind of explained to me on the phone, some kind of trigger pad that he really invented for DJ’s but he said the DJ’s aren’t using them so maybe we’ll write a track using them. So maybe we’ll get together with Brian and that would be a good experimental way to write. I would like to write in a more experimental way.

MK: I’m sorry I couldn’t understand what you said. A trigger what?

BS: A trigger pad. It’s like a pad that you hold your hand above and if you move your hand in different directions it makes different sounds. But he’s grouped a load of them together in some way.

MK: So it’s kind of like a theremin or something.

BS: Kind of like a modern theremin yeah.

RK: Do you guys use any of your vintage equipment any more or have you shelved it all away and exclusively use Pro-Tools at this point?

BS: Well, actually all of our vintage equipment, which was all the equipment we had bought in Joy Division - I’m in New York at the moment and it get stole here in New York in about 1980 or 1981.

RK: Fucking New York.

BS: [laughs] Yeah, That was not a pleasant experience. Emm…vintage equipment. I recently acquired a wonderful guitar amplifier. An AC-30 guitar amp that came from 1968 and it’s been completely unused and I’ve got the original receipt for it from 1968 and I’ve the original instruction manual. When we are using guitars and amps we using vintage equipment basically but we use Pro-Tools…and I write on a program called Q-Base at home, which is easy and speak the language and it’s very quick and fluid and very easy to use and it does what I want it to do. But when we go into the studio and we use producers and engineers they all seem to use Pro-Tools so we switch over to Pro-Tools at that point. We use Pro-Tools HD, which is Pro-Tools High Definition and we actually beat it against tape and it actually sounds better than tape. We master it to Pro-Tools HD. Normally we would master to ½ inch tape but we found that they HD systems sound so good that we don’t bother with that anymore.

MK: So Matt, do you have a final question that you wanted to ask?

RK: I got a bunch dude, but you go first with the journalist type shit.

MK: [we all laugh] Okay…Did you ever think New Order would make it this far as band, as a unit when you first started?

BS: I never look too far ahead into the future because if you do it’s very frightening. [we laugh] I was talking to Moby about this last night. I was hanging out with Moby and-

RK: I’ll digress a bit here. Do you have any plans to get back together with Marr?

BS: With who?

RK: Johnny Marr. You know, that dude who plays guitar kinda good?

BS: Johnny Marr! Oh right, Electronic. Well, New Order really is a full time job right now and I want to get less busy not more busy. I have spoke to Johnny yeah. I saw him at my birthday in January and what we’re going to release a best of album and probably do a couple of new tracks.

RK: Oh, that’s cool, ‘cause I know you and Johnny are really good friends and all that.

BS: Yeah, we’re really good friends. Johnny’s the best!

RK: I think Marc interviewed him recently and Johnny said you guys spent more time sitting on your house boat in Manchester than making music.

BS: [laughs] No, that’s not true. Johnny’s taking the piss. He’s got a studio in his house and you cannot drag Johnny out of his studio. Johnny doesn’t know how to bloody relax. He sees more the studio than he does of his wife. That’s true.

RK: But you as a person have learned to relax yeah?

BS: It’s very important to achieve a balance in your life to maintain your creativity.

RK: One last question, and this is one I know Marc wanted to ask as well. Are you going to be involved in this new Ian Curtis movie? I know it’s a stupid/ cheesy question to ask, but I’m the one with the impending hangover.

BS: [laughs] I think it’s very important to be involved in the movie because what’s shown in that movie will be what people believe about Ian and we want to make sure that it’s an accurate photograph of Ian but our schedule has been so busy we haven’t had time to actually speak with the director yet.

RK: I read somewhere that Jude Law might play Ian. Are you cool with that?

BS: I don’t know because you don’t really see him as Jude Law now would you? That’s a really difficult one that. That is going to be the hardest thing really, picking that actor that plays Ian. It works better in some ways if they pick an unknown actor cause then you wouldn’t have the coloration of that persons movie persona you know. That’s a really difficult one that. I can’t make my mind up about that. I mean Jude Law is a pretty good actor. [we laugh] I mean, he’s really got it.

RK: He’s pretty fucking good looking you know? Maybe too good looking!

BS: He should be playing me, not Ian. [we laugh]

RK: Marc you got anything else?

MK: Not really, no.

RK: Hey Bernard I got to tell you one last thing, man. It’s been really cool to talk with you. Both Marc and I are both huge fans. We grew up on your music, quite literally. So…I think when I was 12 years old I bought Power, Corruption and Lies…I think that was the first record I bought in my entire life.

BS: God, you’re making me feel old man. [laughs]

RK: You are old dude!

BS: [we all laugh] I’m in my mid-30’s. That’s waist size. My waist measurement.

RK: Well, thanks for all your candid answers and all that, dude.

BS: Yeah, well, you caught me on a good day. I’m going back to the UK today so I’m in a good mood, despite the hangover.

MK: Thanks Bernard and have a good trip home.

RK: Yeah, take it easy.

BS: I will. Take care of that hangover tomorrow, Matt. Remember, bananas and a nip of dark spirit if you have some around. Bye guys…

MK: [we all laugh] Bye-bye.



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