In 1974 teenage Salford scooter-boys Peter Hook and Bernard Dicken – who would later change his surname first to Albrecht and finally to

In 1974, teenage Salford scooter-boys Peter Hook and Bernard Dicken – who would later change his surname first to Albrecht, and finally to Sumner – went to see Deep Purple play at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. There’s something rather unlikely about the idea of a pair of suedeheads (“We weren’t thugs or anything; we didn’t go around beating people up,” Sumner insists, before embarking on a lengthy anecdote about a fellow Lambretta enthusiast called Lance, who was later sent to prison for stealing a double-decker bus) going to a heavy rock concert. Though they didn’t know it then, it would be just such apparent contradictions that would sustain them through a career which incorporates as fine a balance of tragedy and fun as any other in the rock’n'roll pantheon. Sumner, who only the week before was laughing at his flu-ridden fellow bandmembers as they stood around in a muddy field having their photo taken for the NME, is now complaining of being “really ill” himself.

It’s not that they doubt his word or anything, but some of his colleagues suspect the proximity of a three-day German promo trip might have had something to do with his sudden turn for the worse.There’s a song on New Order’s forthcoming album, Waiting For The Sirens’ Call, which is called “I Told You So”. It starts with a loping reggae backbeat picked up from a pirate radio station Sumner was listening to on his yacht in the Caribbean. The lyric contains the lines “It’s an occupation I don’t like/But it pays the rent and turns on the lights”. The corrosive cynicism of this couplet did not raise as many eyebrows with the rest of the band as it might have been expected to.”Bernard’s always saying things like that,” grimaces the more naturally enthusiastic Hook between sips of tea in the studio next to drummer Stephen Morris’s farmhouse in the hills above Macclesfield. “He will never admit – God bless him – that he has a good time doing this.

I remember sitting with him at the Montreux Jazz Festival while he had a conversation with Quincy Jones about how all he really wanted was ‘a nice nine-to-five job in a bank’.”Hook – the 2004 Celebrity Big Brother producers’ original choice for the place eventually taken by ultimate winner Bez – rolls his eyes at the thought of Sumner’s perennial dissatisfaction “He has a fantastic life. He gets everything he wants in the world – hops into f his sports car and heads off for four weeks sailing in St Lucia, then writes a song about how put-upon he is … I think,” the former leader of Mrs Merton’s house band concludes, “it’s just his way of being down to earth.”The quality of New Order’s bickering is not strained: it droppeth like the acid rain from heaven And Sumner can dish it out as well as take it. In a recent answer to a magazine questionnaire about Hook’s trademark bass-playing technique – with the instrument held down low around his ankles – his lifelong friend suggested that this had developed “because he’s got an extremely small penis and it covers the gap up so people don’t notice”.There have been few bands with such an enduring (and endearing) commitment to undermining their own legend, but then again there have been few bands with more myths to debunk.