bernard sumner?!

Here comes love
It's like honey
You can't buy it with money

"As it Was When It Was" has great lyrics. Although I must confess when I first heard the line "I always thought....we'd get along like a house on fire" it bothered me because it seemed like the kind of banal thing that someone would drop into everyday conversation as opposed to a more inventive phrase that a genuine "writer" or "poet" might use. After a few listens however, I had a complete volte face as I saw its normality as a sign of strength - Bernard was "everybloke" while simultaneously being part of an amazing band with a fantastic if tragic legacy, signed to a fascinating and absurd record label!

There is a thread here somewhere, I will try to search & link to it, where I posed the question "why so we expect more of indie lyricists than those of other musical genres?" and Nick Dastoor responded with "because they are our fwiends" and I think he may have hit the nail on the head...there is that familiarity and closeness - many posters are or have been in bands and I guess there is maybe occasionally that completely understandable twinge of jealousy when you're sitting writing astounding rhyming couplets in your student garret and lugging your equipment up and down fire escapes of toilet venues to gross indifference only to see *this guy* succeed with *that*...until perhaps you realise that *that* was possibly what made him so good in the first case.

How could I fail to give her
When she cried such a lot?

when a seemingly random shitpost becomes one of the best threads going

So don't tell me about politics
Or all the problems of our economics
When you can't look after what you can't own
You scream and shout all day long

The awkwardness of his lyrics is what I love about them.

When you can't look after what you can't own

^^ see this is the kind of accidental truth over which Sumner occasionally stumles

A lot of posts are basically saying the same thing, that despite his lyrics being objectively ‘bad’ - clunky reaching for rhymes, a reliance on cliches and banalities, ill thought out analogies (I mean yes you can buy honey with money) - they are actually ‘good’ because they demonstrate a guileless authenticity, or maybe a kind of ‘fuck-off’ to a rockist idea of what lyrics should be. And that among the dross he occasionally comes up with a good line (which he does; he’s written hundreds of lyrics by now so it’d be surprising if he literally never came up with something insightful or a good image).

This line of reasoning only really works because of the immense goodwill that already exists towards Sumner and NO in general - you can only like the lyrics because you already like the band, it’s not like you’re ever going to be turned onto the band because of Sumner’s lyrics. And we’re not going to use this same argument for other bands with notoriously pisspoor lyrics, like Oasis for example, because it's hard to work up any sympathy for someone like Noel Gallagher.

Sumner has also admitted himself that when NO started he tried writing like Ian Curtis whom he saw as a brilliant lyricist and found he was crap at it and so stopped trying and wrote what the hell he liked. So that explains at least in part why Movement is such a flawed album in many ways and Summer's vocals are so understated whereas on the stronger follow-up Power, Corruption & Lies he sounds a lot more self-assured as he's delivering lines like "Everybody makes mistakes...Even me" and "You caught me at a bad time so why don't you piss off".

Power Corruption & Lies for me is their best album, and I think it's because it's pretty much at that halfway point between Sumner trying to be Curtis and him finding a new way forward. Lyrically, Curtis is still a presence in a song like Your Silent Face (which I think has great lyrics)

yes, agree with all of that

PC&L also has some of Sumner's worst lyrics, in "Leave Me Alone" for instance they don't seem to be written by a native speaker of English ("we live always underground", "take me away everyone when it hurts thou"), and yet the sentiment in "you get these words wrong / every time" and "for these last few days / leave me alone" resonates nonetheless.

His best lyrics are on Technique - those to "Run" and "Dream Attack" are functional and just poetic enough.

I love everything about Leave Me Alone

Your Silent Face is my favorite ever New Order song, eclipsing even Temptation

I've frequently seen NO described as "greater than the sum of their parts" (that might include this forum somewhere), which seems to me like a polite way of saying "the words are so silly, why doth i love them so". I generally enjoy every bit of NO. The only truly cringe set of lyrics for me is "Jetstream" ("J-E-T / You are so good for me!"). "Ceremony" is my fave and I'm sure many others'... is this the only instance of an NO song with Ian Curtis lyrics? As different as they are as lyricists, the song fits fine in any mix of NO songs (they've sure issued enough of those).

co-sign for Your Silent Face - prob my favourite lyric too, "We asked you what you'd seen / You said you didn't care," so boring on the page, so magical and eerie in the song. I've often thought it was about Ian, which I guess is a crashingly obvious surmise to make.

that slightly out of tune melodica always pierces my heart

I think part of the reason I love Your Silent Face so much was that, in addition to the perfection of the song, their performance of it at Zellerbach in Berkeley in the 80s with Sumner playing the melodica was one of the most amazing musical experiences of my life

I feel so low, I feel so humble

Sometimes in life we take a tumble

You can almost see him flicking through the rhyming dictionary...

If I had to pick a least favourite NO track it would probably be 60 MPH - why sixty exactly? It's almost as though he originally wrote it as eighty or ninety and then had second thoughts or was warned - that's breaking the speed limit, can't condone that! - much as Stephen Hague convinced him to alter the "they're all taking drugs with me" line in True Faith.

Don't much like the "have the devil round for tea" bit either. Hooky's good on that one though, just about makes it bearable. Of course the video's very bearable (arf!)

"Ceremony" is my fave and I'm sure many others'... is this the only instance of an NO song with Ian Curtis lyrics?

maffew12: that and "In a Lonely Place", its b-side which they have played live occasionally.

Zelda Zonk OTM:

This line of reasoning only really works because of the immense goodwill that already exists towards Sumner and NO in general - you can only like the lyrics because you already like the band, it’s not like you’re ever going to be turned onto the band because of Sumner’s lyrics. And we’re not going to use this same argument for other bands with notoriously pisspoor lyrics, like Oasis for example, because it's hard to work up any sympathy for someone like Noel Gallagher.

Also, there's a whole thread of examples in this:

Or maybe the lyrics shed their banality when you’re singing along to such great music.
― an incoherent crustacean (MatthewK),

Sumner has also admitted himself that when NO started he tried writing like Ian Curtis whom he saw as a brilliant lyricist and found he was crap at it and so stopped trying and wrote what the hell he liked. So that explains at least in part why Movement is such a flawed album in many ways and Summer's vocals are so understated whereas on the stronger follow-up Power, Corruption & Lies he sounds a lot more self-assured as he's delivering lines like "Everybody makes mistakes...Even me" and "You caught me at a bad time so why don't you piss off".

― Grandpont Genie

We should note that the rest of the band contributed to the lyrics early in NO's career.

"Everyone Everywhere" works well for me as a portrait of a failed marriage. On paper, the lyrics aren't fantastic, but Sumner really sells them.

Great thread.
Yeah it's a bit of a chicken/egg conundrum. Perhaps, we're just being lenient with Barney's lyrics because of the music and everything this band represents. OTOH I love the mystery and elation that emerge from the combination of certain words and music.
I mean "Nothing in this world can touch the music that I heard when I woke up this morning" doesn't really shine on paper, but the feeling expressed is just so vivid.
As noted upthread, Republic is perhaps his peak as a lyricist. "Special" is great, no caveats needed.

It isn't what it used to be
I wake up every night
on the stairs
waiting for the dawn to come

anyone ever try New Order at karaoke?

I find this whole thread bizarre tbh, I can count the number of memorable Sumner lines (ie, lyrics that actually registered with me/that I can recall off the top of my head) on one hand - the lyrics always felt like an inconsequential afterthought of no real significance. Absolutely baffled that anyone would rate them at all, much less as the "greatest of the rock era" ahead of idk Dylan, M.E. Smith, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, or so many others

You saw my follow-up, right?

there were several afaict but I am not convinced!

but then Joy Division/NO were never huge totems for me, idk. I like them both fine and get their importance/impact but never had a massive personal investment in them as others appear to.

his cousin gordon is alot better!

^^^ a little black spot on the thread today

unique in his own write

I don't know
If we could get lost in a city this size if we wanted to
And I don't know
If I could survive without seeing you

^^ from "Some Distant Memory," a song I adore.

I'm not cruel
And you're not evil
And we're not like
All those stupid people
Who can't decide
Which book to read
Unless the paper
Sows the seed

-"Run Wild". for my ilx homies

ok that's a silly lyric and the song is oddly Christian (what's with that?) and very basic in it's instrumentation... but damned if doesn't make me weep.

we are to each other
like sister and brother

better to live than to know

better the noise that we love than hate

otm:

This is the problem. I just can't figure the guy out.

One minute, he's the world's finest (only?) poet of disco existentialism. The next, he's belching and farting and hanging out with Shaun Ryder, and generally pretending not to be intelligent. You want to grab him and yell "stop trying to be Gazza when you know you're Baudelaire". But can both aspects be genuine? Can he really be an introspective genius in Joe Bloggs and a casual flick? On the evidence of Republic, he can.

In traditional terms, Sumner simply can't sing: after all this time, his voice is still scandalously "weak". Yet, for me, he has one of the most emotive voices in rock. Much of the time, he's cruising on autopilot through inscrutable (i.e. secretly meaningless) abstractions like "It's a jungle, I'm a freak/Hear me talk but never speak". Then, out of nowhere, he'll cut like jagged glass through all the truisms and deliver a truth (Remember 'Thieves Like Us'? "It's called love, and it's so uncool/It's called love... and somehow it's become unmentionable"). When he follows the line, "And we beg and we steal..." with "For we know LOVE IS REAL", it's so clear-as-a-bell plaintive that my heart turns to warm Courvoisier.

where is that from?

Simon Price's 1993 review of Republic.

Yup, still have that one around.

when I first heard new order, I thought that there were two vocalists, a deep voiced guy who goes “a heaven a gateway a hope” and a wobbly guy going “up down turn around!”

Barney talking through a sock puppet

He somehow manages to achieve beauty while writing lines like "You've caught me at a bad time/So why don't you piss off"

I can't think of anyone else who can pull this off like he can, although I am sure there are others.

Best lyricist of the rock era, with winsome voice an added bonus.

― Your sweetie-pie-coo-coo I love ya (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, December 30, 2018

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Barney and also to . . . Michael Stipe???!!

Happy birthday, boo!

I feel fine and I feel good.

sumner's best lyric is probably "regret" but his funniest (though co-written with tennant) is "getting away with it"

I'm partial to the chorus of "Everyone Everywhere," whose arrangement impresses me; the thing is mixed to perfection.

I remember hearing an interview with Electronic where Bernard summarized the theme of Get The Message as "stop spending all me money, bitch". and that was when I realized that I had probably been projecting way too much depth into his lyrics.

3x5 OTM.

The lyric to Every Little Counts is better than all English poetry from the 19th century

I think the idea behind New Order is pure formalism - fantasti engineering in the right context. The lack of commitment can work beautifully, but where I'm at feels clinical about four songs in and I have to put something else on.

New Order is the best argument against using lyrics in critic reviews to signify mediocrity imo. There's something so pure about the combo of the music and those words and Sumner's voice. I never have noticed the words negatively because I find so much of what they accomplish to be truly moving.

I remember hearing an interview with Electronic where Bernard summarized the theme of Get The Message as "stop spending all me money, bitch". and that was when I realized that I had probably been projecting way too much depth into his lyrics.

3x5 OTM.

well, yeah, we should listen to artists describing their own material