Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (11 page)

It’s quite funny really, because even at that early stage of the band we were all pretty distant from one another. Me and Barney – once best mates – had fallen out after a motorbiking holiday in the South of France we went on with Danny Lee and Stuart Houghton, when I’d ended up playing the middle man between the two sets of mates. That was bad enough, but the whole thing went tits-up when Stuart crashed his bike, spent all his money on medical bills and then, when his bike finally expired, needed cash to get home. Let’s just say that, when it came to helping out, Barney wasn’t very helpful: ‘It’s my holiday. Why should he spoil it?’

After that I couldn’t really look at him the same way. When I got back I just hung out with Terry and Twinny – the roadies, in other words – because they were my mates. Twinny I’d met in the Flemish Weaver and got to know him over a beer. But then a couple of days later when I said hello at the bar he was really fucking rude, looked at me like I was off my head and told me to fuck off. I went back to my corner moaning about it to Greg Wood, like, ‘That fucking Twinny’s a
weird one, isn’t he? I had a good crack with him the other night and he’d just told me to do one.’

‘Why do you think he’s called Twinny?’ said Greg. ‘That’s his twin, y’dickhead.’

Ah . . .

He ended up being our roadie – the ‘Karl’ Twinny did, while ‘Paul’ Twinny became a good friend once I got to know him – and mostly I hung around with him and Terry and Platty on the Precinct. Barney ended up becoming quite close to Ian – when he and Sue did eventually get married, in October 1978, they invited Ian and Debbie but not me and Iris, which goes to show how far we’d drifted apart by then – and Steve, well, he was Steve, an island of Steve. He was with his girlfriend Stephanie until he got together with Gillian, and then it was Steve and Gillian, ‘the other two’. That was pretty much how the alliances went for the rest of our careers together. I mean, I loved them as band-mates – I
loved
the group – thought they were great musicians and we really clicked as songwriters. But as people? As friends? Not really. We were individuals, me, Steve and Bernard. The glue that held us together, the driving force of the band, was Ian. Us three were concentrating on just our bits, with him holding it all together. That’s why we never really looked at his lyrics until after he’d died. It was because we were all just concentrating on doing our bit. Three little musical islands with Ian pulling us all together.

The story of how New Order began is for another time, but it was hard to write songs without Ian because the spot we looked to for help was empty. Rob Gretton was our manager by then, so he became the glue that held us together – as people, at least – but when he died of a heart attack in 1999, well, that left nobody. And it’s been downhill ever since – until, at the time of writing, it’s as bad as it could possibly be.

Joy Division and then New Order were ships that needed captains, but our captains kept on dying on us.

So our first gig with Steve was at Eric’s, Liverpool, supporting X-Ray Spex, which you’d have to say marked a new phase of the band: new drummer, getting out of Manchester more. I later found out that the audience was full of members of Liverpool bands: Jayne Casey from Big in Japan, Pete Wylie out of the Mighty Wah! Ian McCulloch from Echo & the Bunnymen and Julian Cope from the Teardrop Explodes. It was there that we met Roger Eagle, a real legend in the North West, who used to promote the Twisted Wheel club in Manchester and had gone on to run Eric’s. It was his idea to put us on twice, first in the late afternoon – a matinee show for kids, which we were delighted about because we really did love to play in those days – and then again in the evening. What’s more, Roger gave us a crate of Brown Ale, our first-ever rider. None of us liked Brown Ale, but still – the fact that we had a rider was fantastic.

So it was great, the beginning of a brilliant relationship with Roger, who we really got on with, and with Eric’s, one of my favourite-ever venues.

The next gig was Middlesbrough. Put on by someone else who would have a big effect later on in our career. Bob Last, who, along with his label Fast Records, would become a great supporter. Now back then, there was none of this, ‘Oh, bloody hell, not another gig.’ It was, ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ Of course, we weren’t used to playing outside Manchester so were all out of bed at the crack of dawn with excitement, me having to run off the adrenalin as usual, and us turning up about midday only to find the venue shut up and locked till five. Great.

We waited around, got in and did the sound-check. Then later when the venue opened it began to fill up with skinheads, thousands of ‘em. Well, probably only thirty, but at the time it seemed like more, all milling around swilling beer. Then just before we went on the DJ put on an Adam & the Ants record, which had some kind of weird, mad amphetamine-like effect on them, like a bunch of six-year-olds drinking Coca-Cola at a birthday party. No kidding, they went berserk. It was if
they wanted to get a full head of steam before the main event. Which was us, of course. As we came on and started playing, the skins surged to the front and immediately started slinging plastic pint pots at us. All of us apart from Steve were getting showered in plastic and beer (not much beer, mind – the pots were empty – but still) and I seemed to be getting the worse of it, with several bouncing off my head. One of these twats obviously had me right in his sights and I spent the whole night ducking. I was livid.

It didn’t affect our playing, though. We were always the kind of band who performed best with the crowd against us. Apart from getting the odd plastic pint pot in the gob it was a good gig. Bob had been watching us play, and had seen this particular skinhead throwing pint pots at me all night, and afterwards he dragged him by the ear backstage. But the dressing room was L-shaped and I was at the bottom of the L, so he spoke to Bernard.

‘This is that bastard who was throwing pots at Hooky all night. I’ve brought him to apologize.’

And Barney went, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s all right, let him go’ – without telling me; I was just sitting at the back oblivious to it all.

Next thing I knew Ian came back and said, ‘Oh fucking hell, Hooky, that skin who was throwing pint pots at you all night – he’s just been dragged back by the promoter to apologize.’

‘Right, where is that
twat
? I’m going to rip his fucking head off.’ Full of the usual bravado.

‘Oh, Barney told him it was all right and to let him go,’ says Ian. I went mad. Stormed up the dressing room and went off at Barney: ‘You fucking what?’ Started having a massive row with him, which was probably our first ever argument, after all those years. Even during the holiday in the South of France we’d never really argued; whenever he’d pissed me off I just used to seethe and bottle it all up. But that night, because my blood was up, I let rip at him and it opened the floodgates because from then we were
always
arguing, worse than a married couple.

In New Order he’d say, ‘If you ever hit me, it’s all over. You’ll never see me again.’ We never did come to blows. I sometimes wonder, though, if a good scrap might have been the answer, might have cleared the air.

Manchester’s punk hub, the Electric Circus, no longer able to afford the big names and refused a food licence – and thus a late licence – by the council, was forced to shut in October. Among the bands performing on the final Saturday were Steel Pulse and the Drones. Warsaw opened the Sunday, while the Prefects, the Worst and the Fall all played, Howard Devoto debuted three songs from his new band, Magazine, and the Buzzcocks headlined, the night ending with a stage invasion and a ‘Louie Louie’ sing-along. Virgin Records sent a mobile studio to record the weekend for a ten-inch
, Short Circuit: Live at the Electric Circus
, which was eventually released in June 1978. It featured ‘At a Later Date’ by Warsaw (though credited to Joy Division, the band having changed their name by then), the performance beginning with Bernard Sumner calling out, ‘You all forgot Rudolf Hess.’

I don’t know the reason for him saying that. One theory is that we’d just played ‘Warsaw’, which was a song about Rudolf Hess. Well, it wasn’t
about
Rudolf Hess as far as I know, but the lyrics quoted his prison number, 31G-350125, which Ian had used because Hess was in the news. A book had come out about him that Ian and Bernard had read, and there were people saying he should be let out because he’d served his time. It was very much a topical issue of the day. However, I don’t know if we’d even written the song at that point, never mind played it.

Whatever the reason, Bernard must have been gearing himself up for it, and we got the shock of our lives when he did it because he didn’t even have a microphone; he went over to grab Ian’s mic to do it.

We’d regret all that later, of course. Because all it did was give more ammo – if you’ll forgive the phrase – to those who said we were glorifying Nazis. But at the time we were just pleased to get on the record; whatever Barney said was nothing compared to that. We’d had a period of lying low a bit. There was the demo tape debacle, then Steve Brotherdale leaving, and Ian in particular was getting frustrated that we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Other bands – the Panik, the Nosebleeds, the Drones, Slaughter & the Dogs – seemed to be overtaking us, which wound him up no end because he felt we were much better than they were. All of which meant that we turned up for the last night of the Electric Circus absolutely determined to get on the bill.

Trouble was, so was everybody else, and there was loads of infighting and backbiting going on. We felt we were being excluded. We didn’t even know it was being recorded.

We couldn’t even get through the front door. We had to use a lot of harsh language and threats to argue our way in and on to the bill, and we found out later that the Drones told the promoter to leave us off the bill and we almost didn’t get to play. It ended up with us going on first; and when we played there was a cock-up in the sound truck. The sound engineer for some reason started recording halfway through ‘Novelty’, which is why only ‘At a Later Date’ appeared on the record when all the other artists got two tracks. As I said, I can’t remember what else we played. But it was another example of the utter chaos that reigned supreme that night. A fucking shambles, it was, most of it orchestrated by the Drones and Slaughter & the Dogs, the bastards. Another unpleasant aspect of this was our first brush with publishing and a ‘proper’ publishing/record company. Virgin, Richard Branson’s label, decided to sign the bands’ publishing for the tracks featured on the record. Each band would get £200 advance on signing, a fortune then, and all bands would receive 10 per cent of the publishing. Now that didn’t seem like a bad deal, 10 per cent each – good old Virgin – and we couldn’t sign fast enough. Afterwards, though, we found out that what they meant was that
all bands
would receive 10 per cent in total, as in 2 per cent each. We got two pence in the pound for whatever Virgin earned on the sale of our track, signed away in perpetuity, as everything was in those days. If you’re in a band, take my advice and get a lawyer, whatever stage you’re at – in fact, it’s even more important at the start. Don’t ever sign your publishing away; you wrote the songs and they should always be yours. Those starting mistakes will haunt you till you die. (I have a ritual with my lawyer, Stephen Lea – lovely man. He shows me a piece of paper. I read it, say, ‘What fucking idiot would sign something like that, Stephen?’ He turns it over and says... ‘It’s you again, Hooky!’)

The only joy where that record was concerned came after we got big, when it was reissued and stickered ‘Featuring Joy Division’. Ah well, back to our tale.

Just our luck, we had to play with both bands again four days later, this time at Salford Technical College. Apparently this was the first time Martin Hannett saw us. All I remember was afterwards chatting up
this girl who lived near Langworthy Road, and then it all going off between the Wythenshawe lads, who were with Slaughter & the Dogs, and the Salford lot, who’d steamed in to get them, and me, like a knight in shining armour, protecting this girl from all the violence. My first groupie.

Of course if a band gets a reputation for trouble then trouble’s bound to follow; and when we played with Slaughter & the Dogs
again
the following night that went off in a riot, too, with all the Slaughter lot upstairs throwing bottles into the ruck downstairs. Later, after Rob became our manager, we got talking to him about that gig and he said, ‘Oh fucking hell, yeah, that was me fighting and throwing the bottles off the top balcony.’ He was their roadie for a while, of course, and no doubt loved all the mayhem that came with it. Their music, thankfully, wasn’t built to last and it wasn’t long before all that speeded-up punky stuff sounded absolutely prehistoric and we finally said goodbye to Slaughter & the Dogs and the Drones.

I suppose you could say we were getting a bit fed up with our lack of forward motion. We’d looked at other bands with records out and decided that the only way was to release one of our own: to go DIY. We’d started taking turns to manage and when it was Ian’s go he worked out that for us to press 1,000 or so records was going to cost about 600 quid. So he borrowed the money from the bank. I think he told them he was going to buy furniture for his new house. I don’t think he told Debbie straight away, either. He saved that particular pleasure for later.

We booked the studio, which was Pennine in Oldham again, and Paul offered a one-stop-shop deal: you go into the studio, play, hand over the cash and in return they give you 1,000 singles, but with blank sleeves so you have to do the sleeve yourself – which of course Barney was going to do, being the graphic designer. Then you had to distribute the records.

In the meantime we got talking to Paul Morley one night. He was writing for the
NME
and had covered the last night of the Electric Circus for them, and we’d made his acquaintance around town, mainly at the Ranch. Although he had this strange art-band project called the Negatives, which annoyed us because we felt they were taking the piss, we asked if he fancied producing the EP for us. Couldn’t hurt to have a prominent journalist on your side could it? He said yes so we arranged to meet him in town and take him up to Oldham. It just goes to show how green we were that it seemed like a good idea – he’d never produced a record before. The morning of the session we sat in St Ann’s Square, the four of us, waiting for him to come. For two hours we sat there and he never turned up. Turned out he’d got pissed the night before and couldn’t get out of bed. I don’t think Paul would have helped much, to be honest, which he freely admits, but he’s gutted about it now. He’d love to say he produced our first record.