Easy Music Guides

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Peter Jones, who played drums for Crowded House, died on Friday at the age of 45. Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper reports that he had been suffering from brain cancer.

The band left a statement on its website confirming Jones’ passing:

“We are in mourning today for the death of Peter Jones. We remember him as a warm hearted, funny and talented man, who was a valuable member of Crowded House. He played with style and spirit. We salute him and send our love and best thoughts to his family and friends.”

Jones was born in Liverpool. He had worked as a school teacher and played drums as a session musician with bands like Harem Scarem, Deadstar and Stove Top. In 1994, he joined Crowded House, replacing founding drummer Paul Hester, and played on the live concert CD Farewell to the World. The band, whose hits include “Don’t Dream It’s Over” and “Something So Strong” broke up two years later. Although Crowded House reunited in 2007, Jones did not join them.

Crowded House Frontman Neil Finn, who founded the band in 1985, paid tribute to the late drummer on Twitter:

“I am very sad to hear tonight that Peter Jones has died. A Great man and a wonderful drummer. RIP Pete.” 

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/peter-jones-drummer-for-crowded-house-dead-at-45-20120520

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Robin Gibb, one-third of the Bee Gees, died Sunday after a long battle with cancer, his spokesperson has confirmed via a statement. Gibb was 62 years old.

“The family of Robin Gibb, of the Bee Gees, announce with great sadness that Robin passed away today following his long battle with cancer and intestinal surgery,” reads the statement. “The family have asked that their privacy is respected at this very difficult time.”

Two years ago, Gibb battled colon and liver cancer, but despite making what he called a “spectacular recovery,” a secondary tumor recently developed, complicated by a case of pneumonia in April. The singer was hospitalized last month and fell into a coma at one point, although he was later said to have regained consciousness and communicated with family members. 

Gibb was born in the Isle of Man in 1949, along with twin brother Maurice. (Maurice died in 2003 of complications from a twisted intestine; eerily, Robin had surgery for the same medical issue in 2010.) Along with their older brother Barry, the brothers began harmonizing as a trio in Australia, where the family moved in 1958. Although the Bee Gees had some success in Australia – they hosted a weekly variety show there – they didn’t truly arrive until they returned to England and signed with manager Robert Stigwood. Robin’s quivering, vulnerable voice was featured prominently on several of the group’s earliest and most Beatles-eque hits, including “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” “I Started a Joke,” “Massachusetts,” and “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.”

Although he looked and sounded like the meekest Bee Gee, Robin grew into the family rebel. By 1969, he and Barry were feuding over whose song should be singles, and Robin, then 20, was declared a “ward of the state” by their father when his drinking and partying seemed to take over his life. “It happened so fast that we lost communication between us,” Gibb later recalled. “It was just madness, really.”

But it was also Robin who, in 1971, made the first call to Barry to reunite with his brothers. Robin’s solo career had stalled, and Barry and Maurice’s attempts to continue the Bee Gees as a duo had floundered as well. “If we hadn’t been related, we would probably have never gotten back together,” Robin said at the time. Robin’s voice was heard, beautifully, on the chorus of their minor 1972 hit “Run to Me.” 

The Bee Gees’ massive second wind arrived with their proto disco hit, “Jive Talkin’,” in 1975; two years later, their contributions to Saturday Night Fever made them bigger stars than ever. Most of the hits from that era featured Barry’s falsetto voice, but the brothers’ vocal blend remained an indelible part of their sound.

The group entered another fallow period during the early Eighties, although during this time, Robin produced a semi-hit album by Jimmy Ruffin, brother of the Temptations’ David Ruffin. The last Bee Gees album, This Is Where I Came In, was released in 2001. Two years later, Maurice died, and with his passing the Bee Gees ended. (Their other, younger brother Andy died in 1988.)

Robin and Barry reunited periodically – in 2010, they made an appearance on American Idol and inducted ABBA into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – and talked about a duo tour, but nothing materialized. Robin, though, kept his hand in music. With his son Robin-John, he wrote an ambitious piece, The Titanic Requiem, a mix of orchestral and vocal pieces telling the story of the doomed liner on the 100^th anniversary of its sinking. “It’s a serious subject and it’s not a rock opera,” Gibb said before its debut. “There are no backbeats. This could have been written 300 years ago.”

Featuring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the work had its world premiere in London on April 10th. But in a sign that Gibb’s health had taken a turn for the worse, he wasn’t able to attend. 

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/robin-gibb-bee-gees-co-founder-dead-at-62-20120520

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This story is from the July 14, 1977 issue of Rolling Stone.

London: 67 Brook Street, Mayfair, is sometimes referred to as the house that Cream built. It predates Cream by quite a bit, actually, but that’s not what they mean. What they mean is that this is the house that Cream bought. The man they bought it for is Robert Stigwood.

But Stigwood hasn’t spent much time in London lately; the pressures of running an international entertainment empire keep taking him to New York and Los Angeles and Bermuda – places like that. His staff carries on bravely, but there’s an emptiness they cannot fill, an emptiness which takes the form of a large rear office on the first floor – the office with the crystal chandelier, the fake fireplace and an inch-thick slab of glass, set atop four stone lions, which serves as a desk. It is Stigwood’s office, and it has been mostly empty for about five years now.

At the moment, however, Al Coury, president of RSO (Robert Stigwood Organization, naturally) Records, and Robin Gibb, one of the Bee Gees, are sitting in two of Stiggy’s leather chairs having what Robin would call a “chin-wag.” This particular chin-wag is focused on the Bee Gees’ studio work in progress at the Honky Chateau in France and on the lifestyle that prevails there.

Al Coury, inquisitive on his first visit to London since taking over RSO Records a year ago, stands up to sniff the air in Robert’s office. “All those famous albums,” he sighs. “All those deals…”

“You must find yourself spending a lot of time on the music,” Coury observes. “Well,” Robin retorts, “there’s nothing else to do.”

It is now early February; since the beginning of January the Bee Gees have been polishing their new album, Here at Last… Bee Gees… Live, and writing material for Saturday Night Fever, a film Stigwood is producing for Paramount. In July they will go to Toronto to record the soundtrack. In September, October and November they’ll be on location for the filming of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an RSO musical extravaganza in which they’ll costar with Peter Frampton.

The demand on the Bee Gees for recorded product has been strong. Children of the World, their last album, is very close to going double platinum, and to intensify the action RSO recently released two oldies albums – a greatest-hits package and a one-disc version of Odessa, their commercially unsuccessful concept album recorded in 1969. Bee Gees… Live, recorded in L.A. in December, is their only live LP, but it was required by their new five-year, eight-album contract with RSO – and besides, as Robin puts it, “These particular tapes warranted being brought out.”

Clearly, these people are in business – show business. “Show business,” says Robin Gibb, “is something you have to have in you when you’re born.” When Robin and his two brothers, Maurice and Barry, were born on the Isle of Man (their father was the bandleader on the IOM-Liverpool ferry) show business was a grand and glorious tradition. It isn’t the Bee Gees’ fault that in the late Fifties, when their act was just getting started in Australia, show business lay dead and pitiful like a fractured racehorse. But you can’t fault them for never quite comprehending that. The Bee Gees, after all, were never conscious of what was going on around them; that was part of their appeal. Even in their heyday they were throwbacks, the last of the Sixties innocents.

Actually, it’s a little unfair to call 67 Brook Street the house that Cream built. Cream and the Bee Gees together formed the foundation of the Stigwood Organization. The Bee Gees paid for these gracious Regency digs as much as anybody. The Bee Gees just weren’t very – noticeable. And it’s always been that way.

Robin Gibb is sitting behind Robert Stigwood’s desk, looking dwarfed, happy, but also slightly nervous. After 20 years in show business and ten years of international stardom, it is still characteristic of him to be uncomfortable about interviews.

I mention songwriting and Robin breaks in indignantly: “No one has ever talked to us about our songwriting! That’s always amazed me. I don’t think people even realize that we write our own songs.

“It doesn’t bother, me, but – you know that Playboy poll? It has a songwriting section, and this year we’re not even in it. There’s people in there who haven’t had any success for the last two years. We’ve had two platinum albums, all our own music, and three hit singles practically at one time on the Hot 100. At this moment we stand to be given the, uh, whatever that award is for songwriting. It’s just that they don’t know their business. They don’t make it their business to know how many records the Bee Gees have written. I call it just – musical ignorance!”

The Bee Gees’ songwriting talent is quite extraordinary. They write hits the way most people write postcards. They write them on demand – any time, anyplace, on any subject. They’ve written a lot of them while sitting on staircases. “Jive Talkin’,” one of their latest hits, was written on a causeway between Miami and Miami Beach. “I Can’t See Nobody,” one of their early hits, was written in the dressing room of a club. The Bee Gees were in their midteens at the time, sharing the dressing room with a stripper.

When they were all at the Honky Chateau, Stigwood rang up with instructions for the theme song he wanted written for Saturday Night Fever. According to Barry Gibb, the instructions went like this: “Give me eight minutes – eight minutes, three moods. I want frenzy at the beginning. Then I want some passion. And then I want some w-i-i-i-ld frenzy!” They wrote the song “Stayin’ Alive” in two hours; it fills the bill. A disco tune, it has real jive precision, like a sleek black Mercedes with an ashtray full of coke. Saturday Night Fever is about the night life of some Italian disco dudes in Brooklyn, but the Bee Gees didn’t know that when they wrote “Stayin’ Alive.” They say it was just an accident that the song they came, up with is as well-tailored lyrically as it is musically: Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother/You’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.

They’ve written four other tunes for the film – “quite staggering,” says Stigwood, “particularly as they did it all in a week.” Robin is nonchalant. “It’s obviously easy,” he says. “We did it.” They did it the way they always do: sitting down together, throwing out lines, not writing anything down – none of them read or write music – storing it in their heads until they’re ready to record. “We’ve all got the same kind of brain wave,” Robin explains.

Stigwood has that kind of brain wave too, although his seems to be tuned to a slightly finer signal. After the band sent him demo tapes of “Stayin’ Alive,” for example, he wanted to know if they could stick a brief, slow piece in the middle of the wild frenzy. “Robert has this thing about songs that break up in the middle with a slow piece,” says Robin. “He did the same thing with ‘Nights on Broadway.’” Stigwood is as modest as the brothers themselves. “I can’t claim any contribution to their songwriting,” he smiles. “I wish I could. I’d be taking their royalties, I assure you.”

Stiggy is right to be modest. The Bee Gees have been writing songs that way since Robin was seven years old. They were living in Manchester then – twin brothers Robin and Maurice, older brother Barry, older sister Lesley and baby brother Andy, all living with their mother and dad, the bandleader. They were part of a little singing troupe that came on in a Manchester cinema before the queen – before the picture of the queen they show between movies, that is.

They picked their name in 1958. Gibb père had moved his family to Brisbane earlier that year in an attempt to escape the grim lot of a working-class bandleader in postwar England. The brothers moved on to bigger Australian venues – places like army clubs, where they performed as a novelty act.

Their father, Robin says, didn’t push them into show business – but once he saw they had it in their blood, he threw himself behind them. Barry and the twins quit school; their father abandoned his career; and the Bee Gees got serious about what they were doing.

Harmonies they already had. Their father taught them how to work the audience. He was good at reading people, too; he could tell if somebody was up to no good. He took care of them. “If he would’ve had his opportunity in his own life,” says Barry, “he would have been a big star. But he didn’t, so it was through us that he was going to make it.”

In August 1962 the brothers signed with Festival Records, one of Australia’s major labels. A few months later the family moved to Sydney, the center of the record industry. Over the next four years Festival released a dozen Bee Gees singles and one greatest-hits album. They all flopped. Finally, the label boss told them they’d have to go. But then they met a fan named Ozzie Byrne who owned a recording studio. Ozzie gave them unlimited studio time – unlike Festival, which typically whisked them in and out in 30 minutes – and the band came up with “Spicks and Specks,” their first Number One single in Australia.

“It doesn’t matter if you become the biggest thing in Australia,” Maurice says now, “because the furthest away you’re known is New Guinea and Tasmania.” “Spicks and Specks” was released in November 1966; in January, the Bee Gees booked passage with Ozzie Byrne to England. Their parents went along as well. “They wanted to stay in Australia,” Robin says, “but we said no.”

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/how-can-you-mend-a-broken-group-the-bee-gees-did-it-with-disco-20120520

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Kanye West has announced that he will premiere a new short film, Cruel Summer, on May 23rd at the Cannes Film Festival.

Inspired by the new G.O.O.D. Music record of the same name and created by West’s design company, DONDA , Cruel Summer is part film, part art installation, described as a “seven-screen experience.” The statement says that Cruel Summer is “unlike anything West has attempted before.” Following the premiere, the piece will remain open to the public for the next two days. 

In the midst of a particularly epic Twitter rant back in January, West hinted at a multi-screen project, though it’s unclear whether this is related to a film that had West sending out emissaries to scout locations in the Middle East. In that same series of Tweets, Yeezy also divulged his initial plans for DONDA. Named for his late mother, he said the creative company would be comprised of 22 divisions, hoping that it “will galvanize amazing thinkers and put them in a creative space to bounce their dreams and ideas.” 

Meanwhile, back in April, West released “Mercy,” the first single from the hotly anticipated G.O.O.D. Music debut album. No official release date has been announced yet. 

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/kanye-west-announces-new-short-film-for-cannes-20120518

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Click to listen to Sara Bareilles’ ‘Once Upon Another Time’

Sara Bareilles plans to spend most of 2012 writing and recording her next album, but before she goes into studio seclusion, the singer-songwriter has a treat for her fans – the Ben Folds-produced EP Once Upon Another Time, in stores Tuesday.  

Her friendship with Folds predates the recently cancelled NBC series The Sing-Off. “We toured a couple of college markets together and then he had a show in L.A. at the Palladium, and he asked me to come sing a song with him he had done as a duet with Regina Spektor,” Bareilles tells Rolling Stone. “So I came out for the show, and we hung out. We’re kindred spirits, I think. He’s an easy person and a musical hero of mine, but also a really funny, intelligent, great dude.”

Despite the friendship, Once Upon Another Time marks the first time the pair have teamed up in any way on record. “I was visiting Nashville, and I went to his studio,” says Bareilles. “As soon as I stepped in the room there, I sort of knew that’s where I wanted to do the EP,” she says. “It dawned on me, ‘Why not just see if Ben would even be interested in producing?’ I called him, and he was excited about it. So it worked out good.”

Barellies feels the EP marks a new direction for her. “I wanted it to sound a little bit different than the rest of my records,” she says. “There’s a rawness, a sonic rawness there that’s a new territory for me.”

While it’s only a small sample of songs, the EP could portend a larger shift for Bareilles: “That’s something I’m interested in exploring more on my next project. For me it’s about nurturing my bravery and how far can I push myself as a writer.”

For her next tracks, she is writing for the first time with others (including Ryan Tedder), and she’s talked with Sia and Greg Kurstin and has plans to write with members of the band Hyper Blend. “I‘ve always been really closed off to the idea of co-writing. Now, for some reason, I’m much more open to it,” she says. She’s also toying with the idea of having multiple producers work on the new album. Though common in the pop world, it’s not something she’s done before.

“I’m antiquated,” she says, laughing.

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/exclusive-stream-sara-bareilles-once-upon-another-time-20120518

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Dave Grohl will make his 11th appearance as a performer on Saturday Night Live tonight when he and the Foo Fighters join Mick Jagger for a performance of . . . well, who knows? This puts Grohl in a firm lead over nine-time performer Paul Simon as the most frequent musical guest in the history of the long-running program. Grohl’s appearances on the show are split between several projects: while tonight marks his seventh time on SNL as the leader of the Foo Fighters, he made his first two visits as a member of Nirvana, and he has played on the show as part of Them Crooked Vultures and as a fill-in drummer for Tom Petty in 1994.

Here are a few highlights from various Grohl appearances on Saturday Night Live.

Nirvana play a brutal version of “Territorial Pissings” on their first visit to Saturday Night Live on January 11th, 1992.

Grohl womps on his kit while Nirvana play “Heart Shaped Box” at the dress rehearsal for the September 25th, 1993 episode of Saturday Night Live.

Foo Fighters perform “I’ll Stick Around” in their first appearance on Saturday Night Live on December 2nd, 1995.

Grohl and Them Crooked Vultures, his supergroup with Josh Homme and John Paul Jones, play “Mind Eraser” on the February 6th, 2010 episode.

Foo Fighters play “Walk” in their most recent visit to the show on April 9th, 2011.

Grohl has also appeared in a few memorable skits while passing through the Saturday Night Live studios. Here he is in the digital short “People Getting Punched in the Face While Eating”:

Grohl also made a memorable appearance as the drummer of a reunited punk rock band at a wedding:

Grohl is a very funny dude and clearly handles himself well in a sketch, so hopefully the next time he pops up on Saturday Night Live, he will actually be hosting the thing.

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/dave-grohl-makes-his-11th-appearance-on-saturday-night-live-tonight-20120519

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Earlier this year, the String Cheese Incident announced that they would offer an allotment of tickets to their summer shows directly through their official website, without any kind of service charge. In a generous gesture to their fans, the band even agreed to eat the credit card processing fees themselves. They were initially able to implement “Service Fee-Free” ticketing for all of their summer shows except one at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on July 13th. But then they discovered a loophole that allowed them to include that gig as well.

The venue recently ran a limited promotion where fans could buy tickets, priced at $49.95, in person at the box office, without the additional $12.90 service charge. So the band decided to enlist volunteers to snatch up as many tickets as possible, which they could then resell at face value – still without a service charge – through their website.

“I think the maximum allotment was eight tickets per person,” mandolinist and guitarist Michael Kang tells Rolling Stone. “So we had some of our management there and we were able to get fans to show up and we handed them a bunch of cash and they all bought tickets.”

The fans did this out of love for the band, and to help out their fellow fans – there were no free tickets or any other incentives offered. “We have a really strong fan base; it’s a tight-knit group of people and it’s been like that from day one,” says Kang. “We’ve always had a group mandate, early on, to just do things we can to help our community out.”

In 2003, the String Cheese Incident took legal action against Ticketmaster in order to secure a larger percentage of tickets that they could sell directly through their own ticketing system. They settled out of court with favorable results except, as part of their agreement, the band was not allowed to publicize their victory. The lawsuit has recently been uncovered, however, and detailed in the book Ticket Masters by Dean Budnick and Josh Baron.

The Greek Theatre move was especially fan-friendly, considering that many of the ticket buyers for that concert are not local to the Los Angeles area. Fans of the String Cheese Incident tend to travel long distances to catch the band at as many shows as possible – especially now that the band doesn’t tour often, or even have any definite future mapped out.

“There are no plans as such,” says Kang. “I think the intention will always be there to try to make it as affordable as possible for our fans. It’s pretty simple really. There’s no master plan beyond that.”

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/string-cheese-incident-stage-ticketing-coup-at-the-greek-20120519

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Hundreds of young Christians took to the streets Friday and Saturday in protest as Lady Gaga arrived in Manila for the latest leg of her Asian tour, the Associated Press reports.

The protesters, members of a group called Biblemode Youth Philippines, are calling for the cancellation of the pop star’s concerts in the majority Roman Catholic country. “She declared a distorted view toward Jesus Christ and for us Biblical Christians it is offensive,” protest leader Ruben Abante told the AP. “Her music and everything about her is different from what our values are.”

Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Ball has been beset by similar incidents throughout Asia. After Christian groups complained about her racy lyrics and costumes in Seoul, South Korea, authorities banned fans younger than 18 from attending the tour’s kickoff show. Gaga was then forced to cancel her sold-out June 3rd appearance in Jakarta, Indonesia, when she was denied a concert permit following objections from Islamic hard-liners.

The Manila concerts, scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, were approved by authorities in the Philippines – with some caveats.

“Although we respect artistic and musical expressions, I won’t allow anyone or any group to provide acts which may be questionable in a way at any venue under my jurisdiction,” the mayor of Pasay City, part of Metropolitan Manila, said in a statement. “We reminded the producers of Lady Gaga’s concert that the show and the event as a whole shall not exhibit any nudity or lewd conduct which may be offensive to morals and good customs.”

The Biblemode Youth Philippines group plans to hold a vigil near the concert venue starting on Sunday.

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/protests-greet-lady-gagas-arrival-in-the-philippines-20120519

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A dramatic element of Loretta Lynn’s autobiography has been called into question following a discovery by the Associated Press that the country legend is actually three years older than she had claimed.

Lynn’s birth certificate, which the AP found on file at the state Office of Vital Statistics in Frankfort, Kentucky, shows that Lynn was born on April 14, 1932. The date on her marriage license is January 10, 1948. In her 1976 autobiography, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Lynn said that she was married at the age of 13 and a mother of four by the time she turned 18. The AP’s revelation would mean that she nearly 16 at the time – still shockingly young, but not a crime in Kentucky at the time, as marrying a girl under the age of 14 was. Her husband, Oliver “Mooney” Lynn, was 21.

Lynn’s spokeswoman, Nancy Russell, declined the AP’s request for comment, saying that Lynn had instructed her, “If anyone asks how old I am, tell them it’s none of their business!”

Herman Webb, Lynn’s younger brother, said that there may have been a mix-up with his sister’s paperwork when she moved to Nashville to start her career in music.

Lynn, who is now 80, acknowledged the perils of discussing her age in her autobiography.

“I’m trying to make a living singing songs. I don’t need nobody out there saying, ‘She don’t look bad considering she’s such-and-such years old,’” she wrote.

Coal Miner’s Daughter was the basis for the 1980 film of the same name, and will soon come to Broadway in a stage production starring Zooey Deschanel.

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/loretta-lynn-story-shaken-up-by-age-revelation-20120519

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This story is from the September 15th, 1983 issue of Rolling Stone.

May 19th, 1980, was no ordinary Monday for the members of Joy Division. Bags were packed and goodbyes had been said. They were ready to leave for America, on their first rock roll tour abroad. They had finished a new single, its title etched across a gravestone on the sleeve: Love Will Tear us Apart.

But Joy Division – such a weird name for a group known for gloomy music and the forlorn voice of its singer – never left England that blue Monday. There was something about the promise of the trip that made lead singer Ian Curtis put a noose around his neck and hang himself the evening before. More goodbyes.

“On Sunday morning, I was turning my trousers up. Monday, I was screaming,” remembers the band’s drummer, Stephen Morris.

But Joy Division would soon become well known in America anyway – both for “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” one of the most influential songs of the past years, and for Curtis’ suicide, which put a lasting chill into the band’s legacy.

With Curtis’ death, Joy Division, which is what the prostitutes’ area of Nazi concentration camps was called, officially came to an end. “I must admit Ian was the charismatic individual in the band,” says Martin Hannett, the producer of the band’s records. Because Curtis had been the focus of the first group, the three remaining members reorganized as New Order.

“There’s life and there’s death. We were still alive, so we thought we’d carry on doing it,” says Morris. With a keyboardist added and guitarist Bernard Sumner taking over as lead singer, New Order is still very much an extension of Joy Division: like uncluttered landscapes in dark colors, New Order’s music remains more mood than melody.

In Britain, partly by unwittingly riding the coattails of the synth-based pop bands, New Order has become one of the first-rank rock groups – the thinking man’s Human League. In America, clubs are playing the band’s twelve-inch dance single “Blue Monday” (which sold over a quarter of a million copies in England) and are beginning to break what may be the group’s biggest stateside hit, “Confusion.” That last and much ballyhooed dance track is the result of a collaboration with producer Arthur Baker, master of the New York street sound and the man responsible for the recent hits “PlanetRock,” “Candy Girl” and “I.O.U.”

Record buyers are also sniffing at a well-reviewed new album of uncharacteristically frisky music, Power, Corruption Lies, New Order’s second and best L.P. To promote it, the band just made its second tour of America – only a small block of dates, by necessity.

“We don’t have a major record company that gives us cocaine at the end of the tour,” explains a downright cheery Stephen Morris, relaxing on a rainy night in June after a sold-out show at First Avenue, a huge Minneapolis club. The band’s keyboard player, Gillian Gilbert, who lives with Morris in Manchester, was back in the room after a bit of “puddling” through the soaked parking lot at the Ambassador Motel.

The Minneapolis show had been, well, a bit somber. When few in the audience seemed moved by the new song “Thieves Like Us,” Bernard Sumner – he’s using that surname after having tired of Dickens (his family name) and Albrecht (his former stage name) – fairly spat out, “If you didn’t like that, you must be Americans.” Many seemed disappointed that the band wasn’t a sad-faced Duran Duran, a party animal; more seemed upset that they didn’t play the Joy Division songs.

“We did ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ once, on the anniversary of Ian’s death,” says the tall, thin Morris, whose drumming – a human sound that plays against the keyboard electronics – is really the band’s signature. “But Joy Division doesn’t exist anymore, and it would be foolish to kid people into believing it does.”

Although a dark cloud still seems to hover over their music, their newest material is pointedly dance-oriented. “I’m not saying we play disco music,” says Morris, “but there are some interesting time signatures knocking about in our songs.” New Order wanted – and got – a true dance mix for “Confusion,” the single they made with Arthur Baker, whose “Planet Rock” they’d admired.

“The fact that they make depressing-sounding records isn’t what attracted me to them,” says Baker. “But once we got in the studio, I used that the way I would use it in one of my own songs. I really do not write happy music myself. My songs are based in reality, on human situations. And that’s what I liked about their stuff.”

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/new-order-life-after-death-20120518