Top 85 Quotes & Sayings by Bernard Sumner
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English musician Bernard Sumner.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
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.
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.
I'm not interested in the past or in talking about myself.
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.
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.
It's impossible to capture every single facet of someone's personality in a film.
Joy Division sounded like Manchester: cold, sparse and, at times, bleak.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not in my nature to be too literal.
I see all the musicians in Blur with equal standing, really.
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.
I'm terrible with decisions. And I can't make myself do something I don't like. I can't knuckle under.
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.
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.
Landscape affects you.
I like a challenge. I like learning new skills because I didn't learn much at school.
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.
I think that if you're on the same team, you should be pushing in the same direction.
Los Angeles produced the Beach Boys. Dusseldorf produced Kraftwerk. New York produced Chic. Manchester produced Joy Division.
I believe that every business and company takes two years to establish.
The guitarist always looks a bit clever because he's got so many strings and apparently knows what to do with them.
As human beings, we all mature physically from childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, but our emotions lag behind.
I entered music at a poppy level.
I think every day how incredibly lucky it is that I travel around the world playing to thousands of people.
With guitar, bass and drums, you've got limited horizons.
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.
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.
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.
Thatcher was wrong. People don't exist - well, they don't flourish - as individuals. Life's about swapping ideas and communicating with other people.
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.
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.
By the time I was leaving school, there were no factories. There was no industry.
If someone throws you in a pool and you can't swim, you're going to struggle.
There's challenges in life that present themselves unexpectedly, and if you rise to them, then those challenges will toughen you up.
As you get older, you kind of take a more sober view of life.
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.
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.
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.
Being a single mother in the late 1950s was a very shocking thing - and dreadful thing - for people.
You can't escape from yourself, can you?
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.
New Order has always been a hybrid band. We always mixed guitar, bass, drums with electronic.
I knew from working with New Order that I enjoyed working with Phil Cunningham.
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.
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.
If you choose to take a path in life, don't blame other people for the path you've chosen to take.
I think New Order have got their own sound. But what we like to do is experiment, using dance music and other things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The drummer is the backbone of the band and is the real underrated one.
Part of the reason I joined Joy Division was so that I really wouldn't have to grow up.
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.
I felt that by the late '90s, I'd gone as far as I could with the keyboard.
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.
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