New Order: Decades, Sky Arts

When Caravan managing director Dinah Lord called me about this project, her first question was: “Have you heard of New Order?” I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

Like most other 40-somethings from Manchester, I’d spent at least an eighth of my life on the dancefloor at The Haçienda. She explained that Caravan had access for a Sky Arts documentary. I stopped laughing.

I knew this band didn’t really ‘do’ documentaries. It had taken Caravan a year, but gaining access to this famously publicity-averse group was the holy grail.

New Order were re-staging So It Goes, the stunning concert they had created for the Manchester International Festival 2017, and this presented us with a rare opportunity to enter their private world.

Sounds simple, but the show was designed by renowned conceptual artist Liam Gillick and staged with a synthesiser orchestra made up of young musicians from the Royal Northern College of Music – and it was all happening in 12 weeks’ time.

“With a 40-year career to peer into, plus a conceptual artist, 15 young musicians and a live event to capture, this was going to be a balancing act”

New Order don’t particularly like nostalgia, but as they were rightly proud of the project, they could cope with some biographical context in order to have it documented.

With a notable 40-year career to peer into, plus a conceptual artist, 15 young musicians, a conductor, a sizeable live event to capture, a mere 45 minutes of documentary time and just three months to make it, this was going to be some balancing act.

I must admit, I got ambitious. Really ambitious. The budget allowed for a brief doc shoot and a few cameras to capture the concert, but we ended up with an 85-minute special, shot on 17 cameras, featuring six full-length New Order songs – they ain’t short – plus possibly some of the most open interviews with the band ever recorded.

Would you believe an arts budget would stretch that far?

Luckily, my aforementioned higher qualification in Manchester music meant we could work with a minimal production team.

Along with Dinah and Caravan production manager Nadine Limb, I set about a dual task: a lean and mean doc shoot in Manchester, New York and Turin with New Order and Liam Gillick, followed by a cleverly planned, guerrilla-style but more expansive concert shoot in Vienna.

It all seemed quite fitting, yet very risky and punk – so naturally, New Order loved it.

I decided the concert songs should be pillars distributed throughout the film – who wants to wait for half a feature-length film to get to the music? Between the songs, the doc scenes would be flashbacks to the weeks before as the show was being put together.

Within those flashbacks, I’d also venture into the historical, biographical elements and the past would catch up with the present at the end of the film. Yep, as if it wasn’t complicated enough, I decided the whole film should be atemporal.

The documentary shoots required precision to capture five specific scenes over a handful of weeks. I didn’t quite bank on the fact that Liam’s New York apartment is next to the UN, which wreaked havoc on the radio mic frequencies.

Added to that, the Osmo mini-gimbal camera looks like a weird gun, so shooting exteriors was a bit sketchy. However, we bagged the scene.

Then came Vienna. We’d had a quote for shooting the concert ‘properly’ – a big truck and six old-school concert cameras. It would cost 70% of the budget and was a non-starter – I only had 15% of the budget to shoot the show.

So following my long-held tradition of shooting sports films with arts crews and vice-versa, I put together a camera team mainly made up of my ace parkour action shooters; my trusty editor Dan Setford; a rigger with 10 GoPros; and a sound recordist who somehow interfaced a multitrack of 18 live musicians with timecode across all 17 cameras.

Then we shot the gig over two nights. It was intense.

In just three months, we made an 85-minute special that I think captures the essence of one of the most unique bands ever. It’s an unusual hybrid of performance and documentary, but somewhere in the risk, trust and invention, we produced a film that mesmerises, entertains, informs and inspires.

It took three generations of musicians, crew and artists and it was only on the final day that I worked out what the final scene and film title needed to be. It had been a collaboration that was decades in the making.