New Order - the band that wouldn't die

At the pavement table of a hotel bar on a sunny Sunday afternoon in London, Bernard Sumner is revisiting the most calamitous concerts of New Order's career in gleeful detail.

There was the time at Roskilde in Denmark in 1984 when they appeared late and drunk with out-of-tune equipment and played so badly the police were called to protect them from the crowd.

Then there was the show in Boston when they performed for just 20 minutes in-between DJ sets. "The police turned up in the dressing room," Sumner remembers, "and said: 'Do you know there's a riot going down there, man?' There were people throwing stones at us when we came out. I got a phone call the next morning from Mo Ostin, the president of [New Order's US label] Warner Bros: 'What the f***'s going on Bernard?'"

The musician smiles. "It's a very Mancunian trait - don't take yourself too seriously. It was more important for us to have a laugh than to have some great career strategy. If we enjoyed what we were doing, that was a great career strategy," he says.

Few bands have been as mythologised as New Order and their previous incarnation, Joy Division, while showing so little interest in mythologising themselves. Let others talk about how New Order rebounded from the suicide of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis to become one of the greatest bands of the 1980s, or how records such as Blue Monday revolutionised the way rock groups assimilated electronic music.

Sumner's cheerful mood is down to the fact that New Order are, once again and most improbably, back from the dead. Barely a year ago, drummer Stephen Morris was saying: "There's no future for New Order." Yet here they are, amid an ad hoc world tour, a few hours before playing the closing concert of the Olympics in central London's Hyde Park, alongside Blur and The Specials.