‘Republic’: the album New Order made while everybody “hated each other’s guts”
Sorry to break it to you, but not all bands can last forever. As much as it might be desirable to hear an artist’s work for the rest of eternity, the very nature of the life cycle will always inevitably get in the way, and that’s only if the crumbling of relationships doesn’t get there first. Maintaining a close friendship in such a high-intensity environment can’t be easy, and while some manage to prolong their existence by ousting members that cause frictions, sometimes that doesn’t seem like a possibility, especially in the case of New Order in the early 1990s.
They’d obviously already overcome issues in the past and cheated the death of a project by transforming into New Order in the first place, essentially representing a phoenix that rose from the ashes of Joy Division after the tragic passing of Ian Curtis in 1980. Many people expected that to be the end of the pioneering Manchester group, and while there was no Joy Division afterwards, New Order was the next logical step that Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris could logically take as a group.
However, after a string of successful releases, had the turmoil of the 1980s finally taken its toll on the band as they ushered in a new decade? By the time they released Technique, their acclaimed 1989 album, the band entered a period of radio silence, and the only follow-up to this landmark album, so to speak, was ‘World in Motion’, which was hardly going to appease the most die-hard fans who wanted something greater to sink their teeth into.
Questions began to be asked of the group as to why they were taking such a long time to follow their last album, having worked at a rather rapid pace in the past, and as it turned out, the band had essentially already called it quits. Sumner and Hook had found themselves new toys to keep themselves entertained, with the former forming Electronic with The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, and Hook starting synthpop outfit Revenge. This left New Order hanging in limbo.
Of course, other bands have members turn their focus to forming side projects all the time, and still manage to survive, but the real reason for their diverted attention was more down to the fact that the inner core of the group was not just showing signs of fracturing; it had practically all but crumbled to pieces. Sumner and Hook, to put it lightly, weren’t on speaking terms, or, to put it into Hook’s words, were at their wits’ end with one another.
“Literally, you’re at that point in the relationship where you hate each other’s stinking guts,” Hook would later claim. “Somebody says to you, ‘Would you go back together, you and him?’ and you say, ‘I would rather die’.”
As it happens, their nightclub, The Hacienda, was haemorrhaging money, and no amount of commercial success from releasing a number one football anthem was going to be able to salvage it, let alone a lesser-performing studio album. While their hand was forced to create a new album, 1993’s Republic, which ended up receiving critical and commercial acclaim, nothing could stop the band from their inevitable breakup.
Factory Records, their label, would disband before the album was even finished, and there was nothing that could save the club either. With Sumner and Hook at each other’s throats on top of this, there was seemingly nothing that could halt the demise of New Order, and shortly after Republic was released, they decided to go on an indefinite hiatus, which is to say, nothing else happened in their camp for another eight years.
