Tag / Ibiza Voice

by Cila Warncke

12 – New Order – Dreams Never End

This feature appeared on Ibiza Voice in 2011.

Photo by Sam Moqadam on Unsplash

How does it feel/To treat me like you do?

New Order is in the news after Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert announced they are playing two benefit gigs in Brussels on 17 and 18 October in aid of their friend and former Factory Records creative producer Michael Shamberg. This is news in part because the announcement was news to bassist Peter Hook, who released a statement saying: “It has taken me completely by surprise! Everyone knows that NEW ORDER without PETER HOOK is like QUEEN without FREDDIE MERCURY, U2 without THE EDGE… it would have been courteous and professional to have spoken to me in advance of the announcements. It is very sad.”

It would be sadder to let the latter day acrimony between the (ex) members of New Order tarnish the memory of a band shaped electronic music. The story goes like this…

Love will tear us apart/Again

When Joy Division singer Ian Curtis hangs himself in his home in May 1980, age 23, the band is left with a Top 20 single and no idea what the future might hold. Joy Division’s swan song, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” is a shattering hymn of lost love and disillusion, and a fitting farewell to the bleak British 70s. Wisely, the remaining members of Joy Division, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris, realise there’s no future in clinging to the shadows of the past. They change their name to New Order, recruit keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, and begin writing new music.

“There isn’t a band in history to have so radically changed how they sound and what they do in such a short time,” writes Guardian journalist Rob Fitzpatrick. The evidence bears him out. “Temptation,” released two years after Curtis’s death, is an irresistible almost-love song that takes Joy Division’s bass-fuelled angularity and drapes it in a starburst guitar and skittering drumbeats. When bands like the Klaxons and Cut Copy ape New Order’s formula, some 25 years later, the press calls it “nu-rave.”

This is perhaps why New Order doesn’t seem radical: we’re used to the mix of glistening synths, jangling guitars and propulsive beats that they conjured from thin air. Their most emblematic record, “Blue Monday” is not only the best-selling 12” in history, it still has an electrifying effect on dancefloors around the world. I’ve seen it start riots at electro clubs and ignite underground techno dins. This is in itself remarkable; doubly so when you realise “Blue Monday” was first released in 1983. To put that in context, the Summer of Love wouldn’t break on England for another six years, US house music wasn’t even in its infancy: it was still a foetus. New Order sensed a future that hadn’t even arrived, and wrote the soundtrack.

Eventually, the rest of the world caught up and songs like “Sub-Culture” and “Regret” reverberated in parties in London, Ibiza, New York – anywhere people wanted to dance. But New Order was so far ahead of the curve they were coming to the end of that particular arc. In 1993 the band took a seven-year hiatus. In 2001 they released the album “Get Ready.” They followed it up with “Waiting for the Siren’s Call” in 2005 then split for good.

Many ways our lives have changed

New Order didn’t fracture on even lines. Sumner, along with Morris and Gilbert (who are married, as well as being band-mates) are on one side of a divide; an unrepentant Peter Hook on the other. The falling out, detailed in Fitzpatrick’s Joyless Divisions: the end of New Order, involves the usual suspects: money, ego, and legacy. Hook says Sumner is a “twat and he always has been,” while the other three are angry that Hook bought the rights to the Hacienda name – the Hac being the infamous Manchester nightclub that helped create the legend of New Order – and that Hook plays Joy Division covers with a new band. Plus there are, inevitably, “personal matters.” The moral of the story, if there is one, is that even the most extraordinary bands are made up of ordinary people. And that nothing lasts forever, apart from great music.

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by Cila Warncke

11- Aeroplane

This profile appeared on Ibiza Voice, an electronic music zine dedicated to ‘hype, lies and gossip’.

Photo: Cila Warncke

Last year [2008], on a hot August night, I was in the bottom of Space Terrace hell-pit, nose-to-armpit with a horrifying selection of gurning, greasy humanity. Not even VIP access and a bottle of vodka justifies my being here, I thought. It was too late to go, and too early to leave, however, so I shouldered my way through the Lynx-saturated crowd and took refuge in the Caja Roja. There, along with five other people, I had the most transcendent two hours of the entire season. Stephan Fasano and Vito De Luca – aka Aeroplane – playing with blissful abandon. If they were disgruntled at being faced with an audience of half-a-dozen it didn’t show. They alternated records, egging each other on, each track more brilliant than the last. There’s one that still haunts me; I’d give anything to remember the name, or even the vocal hook. All I know is it made me happy. I left sober but high as the moon. Aeroplane did what no other DJ did for me that summer: they played music that made me dance.

Much has changed in the last 12 months. Vito and Stephan have parted part ways – “It was friendly, I didn’t call the lawyers or anything” Vito assures me – and the new album, We Can’t Fly, proves Aeroplane can, even solo. Fittingly, I caught up with 28-year-old Vito as he makes his way through airport security to hop a plane to Ibiza. A seasoned traveller, he scoots minutes to spare and chats through the signal-warping walk down the tunnel and a conversation about luggage. “Is making music everything I hoped it would be?” he muses. “It’s the only thing that keeps me obsessed.”

Born in Belgium to Italian parents, Vito’s mum encouraged his love of music. “I started playing around on little synths she bought me when I was five or six,” he says. This led to music school, where he studied piano and guitar, and finally – at the ripe old age of 16 – he started buying studio equipment. Did he always want to be a musician? Vito chuckles: “It’s more like: ‘can I do anything else?’” He tried. There was a stint managing a clothes shop, and he ran a record store for a couple of years but concluded he “wasn’t talented at anything else.”

Whether or not this is true, Vito is definitely talented at music. It’s evident in the magic he summons as a DJ and, especially, in the irresistible, 80s-obsessed, kitscher-than-kitsch yet thrillingly original beats of We Can’t Fly. Critics are gushing:

“It’s BONKERS. It’s a fully orchestrated rock-disco epic, like Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds on a collision course with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon as Trevor Horn, Jim Steinman and Giorgio Moroder battle for supremacy in the studio.”

It is a compliment Vito is happy to take. Giorgio Moroder is one of his heroes and he is unabashedly in love with the 80s. “I tried to record the album as if it was the 80s,” he explains. “I used the same tools, the same process.”

Aeroplane on SoundCloud