bernard sumner?!

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.

That's the danger of believing books
And all the lies of those thieves and crooks
We sing intellectual songs of love
From a stolen pen to a velvet glove

I can't believe there's any controversy about Bernard Sumner's unambiguously bad lyrics. There are some decent lines at the very beginning, where I suspect NO were simply completing songs half-written by Ian Curtis. By Republic, Sumner's lyrics had improved significantly—"Special" is the only song with cringeworthy lines ("I wake up every night on the stairs, waiting for the dawn to come").

But in the mid- to late-80s he just had so many stinkers:

"You waste your time, like my money / it ain't so funny, but it's true (Don't waste my money, baby)"

"It's called love, and it cuts your life like a broken knife"

"From my home I traveled far / I drove in my stolen car / When it broke down, I kissed the ground / 'Cause I don't kiss when you're around"

"I'd tell the world and save my soul / But rain falls down and I feel cold / A cold that sleeps within my heart / It tears the Earth and Sun apart"

New Order is one of my favorite bands of all time, but they are also responsible for some of the worst, most vapid lyrics I can think of.

I can't believe there's any controversy about Bernard Sumner's unambiguously bad lyrics.

^^ fixed

you CAN buy honey with money though

Well not in the society in which that song takes place, which makes you think. Has climate change made bees extinct?

Every “bad” lyric quoted in 3x5 post made me smile with fond recognition and I associate all of them with actual human emotions that I have experienced. Are they great poetry? Of course not, but they are surely effective pop lyrics. From a certain angle they might epitomise a certain passionate inarticulacy very reminiscent of my own teens and 20s (surely New Order are a band for teenagers at heart).

Anyway I am sure all of these points have been made above. But I am also sure that all those songs would
actually be made worse with more careful or worthy lyrics.

sumner's inane lyrics are very endearing and only rarely are they actual clunkers

Every “bad” lyric quoted in 3x5 post made me smile with fond recognition and I associate all of them with actual human emotions that I have experienced.

otm

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