Bernard Sumner Quotes

If you're driving around or at home with the stereo blasting pure dance track, it gets boring within about 15 minutes. It doesn't work at home like it does in a nightclub. You've got no atmosphere.

- Bernard Sumner

I first read about hypnotism at school, and I used to do tricks like getting a really skinny guy to arm wrestle the local bully.

- Bernard Sumner

It's weird: people used to want your autograph; now what they want to do is to take your photograph with an iPhone. And sometimes they'll pop their arm around you to hold their iPhone; they're shaking when they take it.

- Bernard Sumner

I'm terrible with decisions. And I can't make myself do something I don't like. I can't knuckle under.

- Bernard Sumner

When you grow up without a brother or sister, you tend to see things just through your own eyes. You have friends and everything, but you spend most of your time watching TV or sat in a room making decisions about your life on your own.

- Bernard Sumner

If you have a bereavement in your family, it's a terrible, terrible thing. But, you know, time passes. It's part of the cycle. It doesn't hurt so much.

- Bernard Sumner

I'd had to cope with a lot of death and illness in my family from a young age, and that maybe gave me a bleak outlook on the world.

- Bernard Sumner

Joy Division sounded like Manchester: cold, sparse and, at times, bleak.

- Bernard Sumner

One of the things I like about music is it's an abstract art, totally abstract, where you can convey an emotion, which I find amazing.

- Bernard Sumner

Los Angeles produced the Beach Boys. Dusseldorf produced Kraftwerk. New York produced Chic. Manchester produced Joy Division.

- Bernard Sumner

Where I grew up was a place called Salford, which was the industrial heartland of Manchester. And where I lived in Salford, I could walk to the center of Manchester within about 20 minutes. So I lived really close to the center.

- Bernard Sumner

If it wasn't for John Peel, there would be no Joy Division and no New Order. He was one of the few people to give bands that played alternative music a chance to get heard, and he continued to be a champion of cutting-edge music throughout his life.

- Bernard Sumner

Part of the reason I joined Joy Division was so that I really wouldn't have to grow up.

- Bernard Sumner

We didn't play any Joy Division songs for 10 years after the start of New Order, which was a very honourable thing to do even if it meant shooting ourselves in the foot.

- Bernard Sumner

If something I do now sounds like something I did in the past, it's because I played it. I can't help sounding like myself. That's going to happen. The things that I play on guitar that resonate with me are probably the same things that resonated with me when I started playing in Joy Division.

- Bernard Sumner

I'm very proud of New Order and Joy Division, that heritage of songs.

- Bernard Sumner

When Joy Division started, I was scared to death of having to get a normal day job.

- Bernard Sumner

Joy Division finished the 1970s on a high. Our debut album, 'Unknown Pleasures,' was doing well; we'd just finished a hugely enjoyable and successful tour. The band's profile was higher than it had ever been, and it seemed to be growing by the day.

- Bernard Sumner

I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.

- Bernard Sumner

My mother, Laura Sumner, had cerebral palsy. She was born absolutely fine, but after about three days, she started having convulsions that left her with a condition that would confine her to a wheelchair her entire life.

- Bernard Sumner

The drummer is the backbone of the band and is the real underrated one.

- Bernard Sumner

If you hear a New Order track that's mostly electronic, it's generally come about through one person sitting at a computer and programming it.

- Bernard Sumner

As you get older, you kind of take a more sober view of life.

- Bernard Sumner

It's not in my nature to be too literal.

- Bernard Sumner

If someone throws you in a pool and you can't swim, you're going to struggle.

- Bernard Sumner

I'm sure every time I bring something out that isn't New Order, people say it sounds like New Order.

- Bernard Sumner

I think when you're in your 20s, going from adolescence to about 24, I think your life is a series of emotional storms that you have to weather. Life is more emotional at that time, and you're less equipped to deal with what life throws at you. I always think that if you can get past 24, than life really starts at that point.

- Bernard Sumner

Being a single mother in the late 1950s was a very shocking thing - and dreadful thing - for people.

- Bernard Sumner

I believe that every business and company takes two years to establish.

- Bernard Sumner

As human beings, we all mature physically from childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, but our emotions lag behind.

- Bernard Sumner

I think New Order have got their own sound. But what we like to do is experiment, using dance music and other things.

- Bernard Sumner

New Order has always been a hybrid band. We always mixed guitar, bass, drums with electronic.

- Bernard Sumner

The words that I'm most happy with are the ones that come from my subconscious rather than my conscious. They just feel right. I think that's the same with music, really. If you're doing an album, there's ten or eleven sets of lyrics, so you get to the point of inspiration ten or eleven times - it's difficult.

- Bernard Sumner

I never knew my father. He'd disappeared from the scene before I was born, and I still have no idea who he is. Perhaps strangely, it's never bothered me; I certainly don't believe it's really affected me.

- Bernard Sumner

I tend to think in images and feelings rather than non-abstract concepts.

- Bernard Sumner

I saw the Sex Pistols, and they were terrible.

- Bernard Sumner

If you're a lead singer, then you can't afford to be sensitive. On stage, everyone looks at the lead singer, even if you don't want them to - in America, they have those massive follow spots on you all the time; it does your head in. So, if you are a lead singer and you don't toughen up, you're in the wrong job, and you have to get out.

- Bernard Sumner

I entered music at a poppy level.

- Bernard Sumner

I used to be a party monster, very into Acid House, which I saw as my weekend reward for working hard all week.

- Bernard Sumner

Thatcher was wrong. People don't exist - well, they don't flourish - as individuals. Life's about swapping ideas and communicating with other people.

- Bernard Sumner

It's disrespectful to the older generation to have long hair. They fought in two world wars; they didn't fight for us to grow our hair and look like girls.

- Bernard Sumner

You can't put rubbish into a computer and get something good out.

- Bernard Sumner

I think in South America people are very, uh, they have no inhibitions and wear their hearts on their sleeves - what's the word? They're very expressive, demonstrative.

- Bernard Sumner

You can't escape from yourself, can you?

- Bernard Sumner

I felt that by the late '90s, I'd gone as far as I could with the keyboard.

- Bernard Sumner

There's challenges in life that present themselves unexpectedly, and if you rise to them, then those challenges will toughen you up.

- Bernard Sumner

You spend more time with your fellow band members than your girlfriend or wife, and you end up at each other's throats. It happens to all bands.

- Bernard Sumner

There were certain things I couldn't do with New Order without upsetting the rest of the band, so I started to write some solo stuff.

- Bernard Sumner

The guitarist always looks a bit clever because he's got so many strings and apparently knows what to do with them.

- Bernard Sumner

I'm not interested in the past or in talking about myself.

- Bernard Sumner

I'm not interested in how well someone can sing. It's what you're singing that interests me.

- Bernard Sumner

I always felt like there were always egos involved when I was trying to get music finished in New Order. Sometimes it would feel like I was running through water.

- Bernard Sumner

I think that if you're on the same team, you should be pushing in the same direction.

- Bernard Sumner

I knew from working with New Order that I enjoyed working with Phil Cunningham.

- Bernard Sumner

In Salford, we had fish in our tap water. I remember, one hot summer day, running to the toilet at playtime and dunking our heads in a sink full of water. I remember putting my head in and seeing all these little fish in it.

- Bernard Sumner

I've realized that I owe people a look behind the scenes of my own story, because I don't think anyone can have a true understanding of the music without an insight into where it came from.

- Bernard Sumner

Playing live is great, but it's not a creative thing, really. It's a reproductive thing.

- Bernard Sumner

We played at a festival in Mexico City, at the same time as another famous artist, and I reckon we had 55,000 people watching New Order; the other had 7,000. I think from that I've discovered the secret of success in the music industry: don't do any promotion.

- Bernard Sumner

There's only two choices when life goes wrong. You deal with it, or you check out, and, like 90% of people, I go for the former.

- Bernard Sumner

If you go out and just play the old stuff and never write new stuff, you're not really a complete musician, you're a performer.

- Bernard Sumner

It's impossible to capture every single facet of someone's personality in a film.

- Bernard Sumner

Choosing a name for a band is always a difficult thing, and I don't think people should read too much into a name because, after all, it's just a handle. It doesn't mean anything.

- Bernard Sumner

By the time I was leaving school, there were no factories. There was no industry.

- Bernard Sumner

There's parts of touring I like. I like the actual performance part, but the bit when you're in the airport waiting at the carousel for your bags to come around, I don't like that a bit.

- Bernard Sumner

In New Order, I played about 95% of the synths. It's not much fun for the other guys in the band when I'm playing my synth parts.

- Bernard Sumner

If you choose to take a path in life, don't blame other people for the path you've chosen to take.

- Bernard Sumner

We're all private people, but as a musician, I think that once you get to the point where there's more of your life behind you than in front of you, you owe it to your public to explain yourself.

- Bernard Sumner

II'm quite a successful musician, but I'm not sure if it's my vocation.

- Bernard Sumner

I think if you take 'Get Ready,' 'Waiting For The Siren's Call,' 'Lost Sirens' - those three New Order albums were mostly guitar-based. There were a couple of dance tunes in there, but they were mainly guitar-oriented. They came about through jamming, a lot of them.

- Bernard Sumner

With guitar, bass and drums, you've got limited horizons.

- Bernard Sumner

I was interested in Prozac from a personal point of view because I can be a bit moody - things do get on top of me sometimes - so I was quite keen to find out what it would do to my personality.

- Bernard Sumner

I think every day how incredibly lucky it is that I travel around the world playing to thousands of people.

- Bernard Sumner

Landscape affects you.

- Bernard Sumner

I like singing now, but I didn't at the start. I didn't think about singing, didn't know how to do it, so I hit the ground stumbling.

- Bernard Sumner

I like a challenge. I like learning new skills because I didn't learn much at school.

- Bernard Sumner

You have to find balance. Whenever I start feeling stressed or not feeling myself, it's about balance, and it means I need to find it again.

- Bernard Sumner

If I work on music, it'll be for 10 hours a day, so sometimes I'll feel stressed, and I'll go for a two-hour walk. That sorts me out.

- Bernard Sumner

I see all the musicians in Blur with equal standing, really.

- Bernard Sumner

I was no good at anything else at school. But I was good at one thing, which was creativity.

- Bernard Sumner

It can be an educational thing to play your songs to people because you see where you've gone right and where you've gone wrong.

- Bernard Sumner

The story of New Order is all about learning from our mistakes.

- Bernard Sumner

If you start off writing an album with a band, the reality is that you're constantly in each other's company, so it's really important that you get on with each other.

- Bernard Sumner

People come up to me and say, 'You changed my life.' I don't think I changed anyone's life. I think their life changed while they were listening to the music.

- Bernard Sumner