Following the success of season 1 of Transmission: The Definitive Story of Joy Division & New Order, the highly anticipated second season is set to launch.
The series will feature exclusive new interviews with band members Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris, Gillian Gilbert and Peter Hook.
Special guests include Johnny Marr, Billy Corgan, Christine and the Queens, Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint, Keith Allen, Peter Saville, Andrew O'Hagan, Arthur Baker, Kevin Cummins, DJ Pollett, Megan Louise, Tom Rowlands of Chemical Brothers, Paul Morley, Joe Whiley, Kevin Sanderson, Tarkin Gotch, Will Sargent, Virgil Abloh, Alexis Taylor of Hot Chips, Mike Pickering, Neil Tennant, Daniel Avery, Charlie Gunn and Bez.
Narrated by BBC Radio's Elizabeth Alker, season two will chart the band's adjustment as the unexpected global success of Blue Monday transforms New Order into stars.
Quincy Jones offered them a US record deal, John Hughes asked them to produce his soundtrack and, with huge American success looming, New York's hottest producers were queuing up to go in the studio with them.
As New Order's profile grew, so did the demands and excesses, and the band began to realise how far they had come and wondered how far they could continue on this path.
The series takes us behind the scenes at the peak of arena tours, Ibiza madness and chaotic Hacienda, plus documenting the making of three classic albums “Brotherhood”, “Technique” and “Republic”, as well as the timeless FIFA World Cup theme song “World in Motion”.
Speaking about New Order's career so far, singer Bernard Sumner said, “If we'd done it the way everyone else did it, we might have been more successful, but it would have been short-lived. But doing it the way New Order did it made us more interesting, but it wasn't intentional, we just did what we wanted and didn't really listen to anybody.”
Speaking of New Order's success in America in the '80s, drummer Stephen Morris said, “Nobody in America had heard of Joy Division. At that time in the UK and Europe, people were still coming to see us hoping they'd play 'Love Will Tear Us Apart.'”
“In America, on the other hand, they were more open-minded and the bigger audiences justified our adamant stance that we weren't Joy Division.”
Keyboardist Gillian Gilbert says of her experience in the US music industry: “I don't know what people thought of us. Rob[Gretton, manager]always said, 'You can't just have one person as the main character, even if it's Ian. We're all the same.' We were all on the same level.”
“So I don't know what they thought of us. They always turned up in suits. That was the main thing you saw. All the really smart record company people wore suits.”
Peter Hook talks about how their club, the Hacienda, predicted the future of rave music: “Watching the Hacienda and the nights they spent with the exact same DJs in 1983, '84, '91 and '83, I saw Rob and Mike Pickering believe in Detroit and Chicago house. They believed in music long before the tides of ecstasy swept through it.”
New episodes of Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy Division & New Order will be available weekly starting today, September 4, on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music, Stitcher, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Also today, New Order announced a new remastered-format set of their album Brotherhood, to be released by Warner Music on November 22nd.
It will be released as 2CD, 2DVD and 1LP, and will also feature reissues of the 12″ singles “Bizarre Love Triangle”, “State Of The Nation” and “Touched By The Hand Of God” with B-sides.
Brotherhood is the fourth in a series of limited edition definitive box sets that also includes The Movement (2019), Power, Corruption, and Lies (2020) and Lowlife (2023).
Written, recorded and produced by New Order, Brotherhood was first released in September 1986 on Factory Records and peaked at number 9 in the UK Albums Chart.
This new Brotherhood collection includes the album remastered on vinyl and CD, 2CDs with nine previously unreleased tracks and demos from the 1985 recording sessions in Japan, and 2DVDs featuring live performances at Brixton Academy (1987), G-Mex Manchester (1986) and Glastonbury, as well as British and European television programmes never before available on DVD.
