The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 24

THE GUARDIAN Wednesday May 12 1993 New Order have overcome the collapse of Factory Records and leapt into the charts with a number one album Leonard Cohen is loving every wittily despairing minute Grocer of gloom Adam Sweeting fir Caroline Sullivan YOU can market anything nowadays. Why should gloom and melancholy be any different? Leonard Cohen has realised this. "Don't wait for the apocalypse, it's already happened," he has declared. "A lot of my work is about what is appropriate behaviour in the face of the flood." Now in his late fifties, Cohen has reached the conclusion that, doomsday or not, a measure of cautious celebration is in order. The Future, the keynote song from his latest album, warns bale-fully that "things are going to slide in all directions" while his backing singers wail but Leonard's return to the Albert Hall had about it an air of ironic thanksgiving, a mutual celebration of survival against mounting odds.

Cohen addressed us as "my dear engaged in humorous banter with hecklers, and thanked us not merely for coming but for sticking with him for a Bruce-like three-and-a-half hours. The sardonic wit which now informs everything Cohen does was presumably always there somewhere, but the late-period Len only clicked into focus with 19S8's I'm Your Man album, whichended a bleak decade in which Cohen had struggled unsuccessfully to find a new direction, and songs from it, especially Ain't No Cure For Love, Tower Of Song and First We Take Manhattan gave him a platform for a complete career-relaunch. Those songs are centrepieces of his current stage show, handled with discretion by an impeccable band featuring Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen as exuberant vocal foils to put the skids under a ALMOST 50 years to the day when he first began work on it, Bertolt Brecht's adaptation of John Webster's The Duchess Of Main will finally receive its world premiere. 1The Brecht archives in Berlin has no less than five different versions of the play an indication of its troubled genesis but it is the text on which Brecht collaborated with Auden which Academy Productions will be premiering at the Chelsea Centre next week. Director Andy Lavender is hoping that his production will run rather more smoothly than the original abortive production.

In early 1943, Brecht, eager to conquer Broadway, began work on an adaptation of Webster's bloody Jacobean revenge tragedy. The partner- ship with Auden was not entirely happy: Brecht ironically commented that the poet "saw to it that the startling policy own-goal was his refusal, at least initially, to advertise the records released by his label. "We still get on with him. We just think he's a twat and the feeling's probably mutual," said Sumner, breasting a Himalaya of crispy duck. "We didn't used to sell T-shirts at our gigs because that was self-promotion, which was against our "principles'.

Then on the first American tour, we found out how much money you could make. So we had this novel idea we should sell T-shirts at our gigs and take money for it" A benefit of Factory's haphazard-ness was an atmosphere of artistic freedom that enabled New Order to invent electronic dance-pop as we know it Rarely has so much been owed by so many to so few: New Order's experiments with synthesised sound, starting with their 1981 album debut Movement (which followed the demise of Joy Division), has inspired everyone from Public Enemy to Dan-nii Minogue now you know who to blame. Republic, their seventh album, may eventually be eulogised as the group at the peak of their powers. "I have an enormous downer on myself and what we do. If it had gone in the charts at No 60, I'd have said, 'I was right' commented Sumner of the album.

In a masterstroke of timing, as he spoke, the cork from a celebratory bottle of champagne shot across the table into his dinner. In' the event Republic's notices have been near-unanimous raves. The lustre of its synth-melodies invites worrying adjectives like "mature" and "Virgin but that the price the band must pay for having created such a flawless pop record. It'll be surprising if New Order doesn't finesse the Best Group award at next year's Brits a distinction for which, by the way, they've never previously been eligible because Factory refused to join the BPI, the industry body that orchestrates the awards. "They did join for one year, and I think they still owe the 500 for the membership fee," Hook said.

Each member now is simultaneously involved in other projects. Keyboardist Gillian Gilbert and drummer Stephen Morris are in the wryly-titled The Other whose first album will be released in September. Hook exercises his rock star fantasies in Revenge and Sumner works with guitarist Johnny Marr in the acclaimed Electronic. New Order have no plans to milk Republic with a long tour. There are just a few shows scheduled: a short set at the upcoming Peace Together benefit in Dublin, a headliner at the Reading festival.

Don't be surprised to hear New Order along with the other "quality rock" on Virgin 1215. Just don't hold it against them. New Order Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris PHOTOGRAPH: STEVE DOUBLE Len at work Hints of cautious celebration among the old despair PHOTOGRAPH; HENRIETTA BUTUP Cohen's wom-big-ends croak. A solo version of Bird On A Wire and a gospelled-up So Long Marianne illuminated the long road Cohen and his devotees have travelled. Cohen has always approached music at an oblique angle.

His first musical adventure was, fantastically, with a country western trio called The Buckskin Boys. He may have planted the seed for his recent song Closing Time, which sounds like music from a Yiddish honky-tonk. But Cohen's first calling was as poet and novelist, which brought him showers of critical acclaim but only a sprinkling of loose change. He concluded that even singing couldn't be less lucrative, and made his debut album in 1967. Always more itinerant writer than rock star, he bounced around Europe, experimented with Nashville and now calls Los Angeles home.

"Los Angeles is a great city," smiles Leonard. "It's falling apart on every level a very suitable landscape for my dismal expression." And dismal it isn't. In his grey suit, black shirt and mowed-flat hair, Cohen resembles a puckish hybrid of AI Pacino and Peter Sellers, hawking warnings of doom while barely able to suppress great guffaws of laughter. "We are demented creatures whose agony and anguish can only be cured by applause," he announced, gesturing towards his band. Leonard is loving every minute.

original was not unduly Auden's said he only did it for the money. The adaptation was not completed until 1946. But Brecht's problems were only just beginning. The English director George Rylands was hired to mount the American production, but when he found he was not to direct Webster's original text, he threatened to take the next plane home. But the producers decided to put on the Webster version so when Brecht, arrived in Boston to see the play on its out of town try-out he found the production which bore his and Auden's name had little resem- -blance to their text Brecht wryly referred to his and Auden's version of the play as "the amputation of a literary But it is more an act of creative vandalism in which the grand gui-gnol and subplot have been excised.

The Duchess Of Malfi opens at London's Chelsea Centre on May 19. Tel: 071 352 1967. Lyn Gardner WO MEMBERS of New Order were sitting in a chromey Chinese restaurant in Chelsea, remembering their visit to the Skin 2 fetish club. "I thought it was an interesting night out all those girls in rubber," said the lupine bass player, Peter Hook, leering through a bearaus honibilis. Glamour-boy guitaristvo calist Bernard Sumner disagreed.

thought they were a bunch of per verts, he says before appending: "Dry Mancunian wit" If New Order aren't that city's most famous citizens, they are indisputably its most famous rock band. When we met last Sunday, their new album, Republic, had just entered the chart at No 1, as its predecessor. Technique, did in 1989. Republic's success marks the group's emergence from a hellish year that saw their label. Factory, go into receivership with debts of 3.5 million.

Halfway through Republic's recording, Factory stopped paying studio bills, forcing New Order to pay the remaining themselves. "But if we hadn't the receiver would have owned 50 per cent of the album and we'd have been done up like a kipper," Sumner deadpanned. What did happen was that weeks after the LP's completion last November, the Factory closed, and the receivers waded into a labyrinthine mess. There were unpaid bills going back years, among them royalties owed New Order for the million-selling Technique. However Factory's bohemian way of doing business had inadvertently produced one compensation.

New Order discovered that they had never had a formal contract with the label, which meant that they rather than Factory owned their back catalogue. This was a powerful bargaining chip when they began negotiations with other companies. London won, and Republic was released week. As Factory's biggest band, New Order's delay in following up Technique has been cited as a factor in the bankruptcy. Not true, grumped Hook, explaining: "We had been in the studio all the time, doing bits.

While we were recording, we found out that Factory was in danger of going bankrupt because they came to us wanting to borrow money. They owed us a lot of royalties and they told us if we didn't lend them money we wouldn't get paid." Sumner added: "They'd basically turned from a record company into a black hole that absorbed currency, and if we'd released the album any earlier, the monies from it would have been absorbed into this huge vacuum cleaner." Hmm. So how are present relations with Factory's founder, Tony Wilson? His vision of Factory was of a highbrow salon for the arts where an album's sleeve illustration was as important as the music within. One.