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Bernard Sumner [1956-0] English
Rank: 102
Musician, Singer


Bernard Edward Sumner, also briefly known as Bernard Albrecht, is an English singer, songwriter, musician and record producer. He is a founding member of both Joy Division and New Order, and is widely credited with the latter band's move towards electronica and synthpop.

Learning, Amazing



QuoteTagsRank
There's challenges in life that present themselves unexpectedly, and if you rise to them, then those challenges will toughen you up.
101
The story of New Order is all about learning from our mistakes. Learning
102
I like a challenge. I like learning new skills because I didn't learn much at school. Learning
103
Landscape affects you.
104
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. Amazing
105
If you choose to take a path in life, don't blame other people for the path you've chosen to take.
106
With guitar, bass and drums, you've got limited horizons.
107
I think every day how incredibly lucky it is that I travel around the world playing to thousands of people.
108
I'm terrible with decisions. And I can't make myself do something I don't like. I can't knuckle under.
109
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.
110
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.
111
It's impossible to capture every single facet of someone's personality in a film.
112
I felt that by the late '90s, I'd gone as far as I could with the keyboard.
113
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.
114
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.
115
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.
116
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.
117
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.
118
I knew from working with New Order that I enjoyed working with Phil Cunningham.
119
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.
120
Part of the reason I joined Joy Division was so that I really wouldn't have to grow up.
121
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.
122
Los Angeles produced the Beach Boys. Dusseldorf produced Kraftwerk. New York produced Chic. Manchester produced Joy Division.
123
Joy Division sounded like Manchester: cold, sparse and, at times, bleak.
124
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.
125
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.
126
I entered music at a poppy level.
201
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.
202
If someone throws you in a pool and you can't swim, you're going to struggle.
203
I'm not interested in the past or in talking about myself.
204
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.
205
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.
206
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.
207
It's not in my nature to be too literal.
208
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.
209
Thatcher was wrong. People don't exist - well, they don't flourish - as individuals. Life's about swapping ideas and communicating with other people.
210
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.
211
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.
212
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.
213
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.
214
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.
215
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.
216
As you get older, you kind of take a more sober view of life.
217
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.
218
I think New Order have got their own sound. But what we like to do is experiment, using dance music and other things.
219
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.
220
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.
221
I see all the musicians in Blur with equal standing, really.
222
The drummer is the backbone of the band and is the real underrated one.
223
The guitarist always looks a bit clever because he's got so many strings and apparently knows what to do with them.
224
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.
225
Being a single mother in the late 1950s was a very shocking thing - and dreadful thing - for people.
226
By the time I was leaving school, there were no factories. There was no industry.
301
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.
302
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.
303
I think that if you're on the same team, you should be pushing in the same direction.
304
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.
305
New Order has always been a hybrid band. We always mixed guitar, bass, drums with electronic.
306
I'm not interested in how well someone can sing. It's what you're singing that interests me.
307
You can't put rubbish into a computer and get something good out.
308
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.
309
I saw the Sex Pistols, and they were terrible.
310
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.
311
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.
312
I tend to think in images and feelings rather than non-abstract concepts.
313
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.
314
I'm very proud of New Order and Joy Division, that heritage of songs.
315
I believe that every business and company takes two years to establish.
316
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.
317
When Joy Division started, I was scared to death of having to get a normal day job.
318
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.
319
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.
320
I was no good at anything else at school. But I was good at one thing, which was creativity.
321
I never met Morrissey.
322
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.
323
II'm quite a successful musician, but I'm not sure if it's my vocation.
324
I used to be a party monster, very into Acid House, which I saw as my weekend reward for working hard all week.
325
Playing live is great, but it's not a creative thing, really. It's a reproductive thing.
326
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.
401
You don't see yourself in the same way other people see you.
402
I'm sure every time I bring something out that isn't New Order, people say it sounds like New Order.
403
You can't escape from yourself, can you?
404
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.
405
As human beings, we all mature physically from childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, but our emotions lag behind.
406
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.
407

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