Singularity: The Influence Of New Order

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Simon Stephens is a playwright, previously Resident Dramatist at the prestigious Royal Court Theatre (UK) and he is currently Artist Associate at the Lyric in Hammersmith, London. He's won numerous awards, most recently for his script for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which won an Olivier and a Tony. He was also bassist in the band Country Teasers. Photo by Kevin Cummins.

I grew up wanting to write because of the music that I heard not because of the plays that I saw or the books that I read.

I went to the kind of school where admitting to a love of literature or an interest in theatre would lead to getting your head kicked in. So I kept these things to myself. But I could be fearless about music. And I grew up in Stockport, on the edge of a city where the best music in the world was being made.

The angst and the shit of a teenage suburban life were soothed by the dissonant snarl of Mark E Smith and melancholic comedy of Morrissey and the promise of swagger and glory of the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses. And then there was New Order.

I would stay up until two in the morning on a Sunday night listening to Manchesters bespoke John Peel, Tony Michaelides Last Radio Programme and it was there that I properly heard New Order for the first time. The gorgeous rumble of Blue Monday might have been one of those surprisingly cool chart sensations that existed on the more alert peripheries of my 12-year-old consciousness but I never properly listened to it. It was Perfect Kiss that ripped my skull open.

It is an astonishing song. Astonishing because of its gorgeous rhythms and haunting, deeply sad and weirdly uplifting melody but astonishing, to my teenage head, because of the jarring drama of Bernard Sumners lyric. For eighteen months the couplet pretending not to see his gun I said lets go out and have some fun rattled round my head. What world was being opened by this mans pop heart? A word of secrecy and danger and battered attempts at friendship and compassion. I remember playing the song to my friends and trying to get them to see how much of a work of genius the song was. Im not sure they ever got it like I did. But when I look at my plays now I think that the same tension between danger and compassion underpins all the stories I have tried to tell in the plays that I have written. Like Im still trying to see if people get it in the way that New order palpably did.

Lowlife the album Perfect Kiss came from was a masterpiece. I listened to it constantly. Technique though was something else altogether. Coming, in my blurred inaccurate memory, in the wake of the arrival of Stone Roses and Happy Mondays on Top of The Pops it took their swagger and with humour and grace and deeper proper sadness made those two brilliant bands look like children. It is, I think, the best album of the eighties.

Ive listened to it now for twenty-five years. With its ecstasy driven rhythms and glorious melodies it still catches me by surprise. And those dramas are there. That search for the possibility of love or compassion in a battered Manchester that had yet to be changed by the investments of the nineties haunted me and made sense of that 192 bus route from Stockport into town.

It is an album that sits in the metabolism of my play Port. Port is a play that dramatizes the life of a girl growing up around the same time that I did in the same town with the same sense of self and yearning for escape. It was directed by Marianne Elliot at the Royal Exchange Theatre in 2002 and revived by her at the National theatre in 2013.

The music of Manchester at that time was rich in its spirit and used in its sound design.

In the scene change from the first scene where her Racheal, the plays heroine, watches her Mother leave her forever to the second where she has become a surrogate mother for her brother, she grows from the age of 9 to the age of 11. On the huge cavernous stage of the Royal Exchange and ten years later in the enormous Lyttleton stage at the National Marianne and sound designer Ian Dickinson cranked All The Way to a maximum volume as Racheal faced her future.

In those huge rooms Bernie sang out. It takes years to find the nerve to be apart from what youve done, to find the truth beside yourself and not depend on any one.

What a glorious lyric to hear hollering around the magical halls of Englands greatest theatres. Every time I heard it in performance, and when I hear it still, its hard to stop the hairs on my arm from standing on end. Bernie was singing Racheals song. But he was singing a song that cut to the quick of my teenage sense of self and still, to a degree, my sense of self now. With that quicksilver mix of tenderness and defiance that always galvanised me. He is a writer who makes me want to write. Always was. Always will be.

I am very, very glad he and his band are back. We are far richer for their presence.

-Simon Stephens

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Singularity: The Influence Of New Order