Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (25 page)

That gig, though, at Tottenham Court Road, when we played with Echo & the Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes . . . I remember I drove down in the van, as usual (and yes, it’s another poor-old-me-in-the-van story coming up, but it’s my book), and we parked in central London.

‘Right you wait here in case the promoter comes,’ said Rob to me. ‘We’ll go get something to eat.’ ‘We’ meaning him, Bernard, Ian, Steve, Dave, Terry and Twinny, leaving me all alone with the van.

I said, ‘Well what about me having something to eat, you bunch of bastards?’

They were like, ‘Stop fucking moaning, Hooky,’ then buggered off, and I sat there behind the wheel of the parked van, seething, thinking,
What a bunch of rotten bastards. Why do I drive the van? Why do I always get left behind?
The usual. Then I looked across and saw another van parked opposite me, transit with a guy in the driving seat, sitting muttering away to himself. A bloke in a group, you could tell.

I crossed the road to him and went, ‘All right, mate?’

He went, ‘All right, la.’

‘Who are you with, then?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m Les. I’m the bass player from Echo & the Bunnymen.’

I said, ‘You what? You drive the van as well?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Have they all fucked off and left you here to do the loading?’

‘Yeah.’

We became great mates after that, me and Les, both of us the bass player and van driver for our bands. But I was jealous because he had
a double-wheel transit: bigger load capacity and a more powerful engine, you see. On the other hand, my single-wheel was cheaper to run, and the band were saving quite a lot of money in travel and van-hire costs because of it. I still hated it, though, because it was me who had to drive and maintain the bloody thing – and even pay for it, remember. There were times I wished we’d never had it.

Well, they do say that you should be careful what you wish for . . .

London was still a big and sexy place to us, so it was always a bit of thrill to play there, and to get a gig at the Nashville Rooms was extra special. After all, that was where the Pistols had their famous concert that got them in the
NME
that I saw in the car park at Newquay, which inspired me to go to see them, etc., etc.

It turned out to be one of those brilliant gigs, because this this was the first time I remember seeing the audience mouthing along with the words – and that is a really
Whoah
moment when you’re in a band. Quite an odd sensation, really, when you think of where the song has come from – the four of you freezing your arses off in T. J. Davidson’s – to see that it’s travelled all that way. It’s sort of thrilling and embarrassing at the same time.

So it was a storming gig, apart from the fact that halfway through a guy climbed out of the audience – a punk who got up on stage. We thought,
This guy’s come up to have a dance or whatever
, and kept on playing, but he sauntered right past us and went back to where the dressing room was.

We were looking at each other, like,
What the fuck’s he playing at?
but still playing, when a couple of minutes later he reappeared and went to climb down off the stage back into the crowd. I stopped him. Still playing, I said, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’

‘Oh, I just went for a piss,’ he said.

I said, ‘In our fucking dressing room? You cheeky get,’ and kicked him right off stage.

Fast forward to about twenty years later, and this guy comes up to me, can’t remember where it was, and says, ‘Hello.’

‘All right, mate,’

He said, ‘I saw you when you were Joy Division, at the Nashville Rooms in London. I was with my friend, who got up on stage and went for a piss in the dressing room, and you kicked him off stage.’

‘Yeah, I remember him,’ I said. ‘The cheeky bastard.’

He said, ‘Yeah, well, he ended up hanging himself.’

I went, ‘Oh. Fuck. He didn’t hang himself because of that, did he?’

‘Oh, no, not because of that. It was a few years after that.’

I said, ‘Well thank fuck for that!’ Which I realize wasn’t the most sensitive response but I just had this image, you know?

Anyway, back to the gig. What used to happen when we packed the van after a gig was that Twinny would arrange all the gear so he could lie on the bass cab in a sleeping bag (not Barney’s) and sleep all the way home. He wasn’t there for that particular gig, though, which he was absolutely gutted about because it was one of the first gigs he’d ever missed. But we managed without him and, after the gig, packed the van and set off, me ahead of Steve, who had strict instructions to stay behind me because I was worried about the van not making the journey.

Knackered, it was, the van. We’d lost the petrol cap and someone – not me – had replaced it with a rag to stop the petrol evaporating. Trouble was, the rag was merrily disintegrating and every so often would block the filter on the carburettor and stop it working. I could always tell when it was going to happen because the van started to slow down gradually, which it had been doing on the way to London that day. There was no power in it at all. And I knew that when I got home I’d have to take the air filter off, take the carburettor off, take it apart, renew all the gaskets, clean the main jet, put it back together again, put fucking everything back on and then it would work fine for a while. What a job.

But first I needed to get home, and I was seriously doubting the van would make the trip. It was going really slowly, about thirty miles an hour top speed. We were pottering home. Next to me Terry fell asleep. I looked in my mirror and could see Steve but he’d dropped quite far behind; there was just me and him on the motorway, as it often was in those days, especially in the early hours of the morning.

We’d just joined the M5 when I started to feel sleepy. Terry was snoring away beside me and I couldn’t see Steve in the mirror any more. The next thing I knew there was this huge bang and the van suddenly shot forward so hard that my head hit the divider and for a second I was seeing stars, just barely aware of thinking that the carb must have suddenly cleared because our speed suddenly increased, at the same time feeling the van spin around and the pain. That and a massive squealing of tyres.

I must have been dazed. Because when I got my vision back we were sitting on the hard shoulder, facing the right way, and I thought I was dreaming because a forty-foot lorry was sliding down the motorway past me, sideways on, its tyres screeching as it drew to a stop right across the motorway, blocking all three lanes. The next thing I saw was Ian Curtis running down the motorway chasing a drum that was rolling away – a drum that should have been in the back of my van.

My head was still clearing when Ian arrived at the window carrying the tom.

‘Are you all right, Hooky? Are you all right?’

‘What’s happened?’ I said, completely befuddled by the whole thing.

Terry was the same, looking around him in a complete daze. Turned out the forty-footer had hit us at about seventy miles an hour, shunting us and sending us spinning in two complete 360s; it had taken out the back of the van, snapping the back axle and flattening the rear doors. My bass cab had come shooting out the back like a comedy coffin, straight under the wheels of the forty-footer.

Thank God Twinny hadn’t been sleeping on it.

I spent the rest of the night being held back from punching the lorry driver, who was from Manchester but wouldn’t give us a lift back there. We cleared up our gear from the motorway, worrying that the coppers would find out about my bent MOT. I watched as it was towed away. It wasn’t really until the next morning – well, it was the afternoon by the time I woke up – that the reality of it all hit me: the van was history. It was an ex-van. It had ceased to be. No more driving the van for me. From then on either Terry, Twinny or Dave Pils drove a hired van, and every night after a gig I lived it up with the rest of the band in the bar, boozing and trying to pull girls.

On the one hand, it was absolutely magnificent. On the other hand, I ended up an alcoholic.

It was at the Nashville Rooms gig that Annik Honoré came into Joy Division’s orbit. She and her friend Isabelle, having travelled from Belgium to see the band, approached the sound engineer at the venue then spoke to Rob Gretton, who agreed to an interview for Belgian fanzine
En Attendant
(Waiting) on 22 August, after the band’s gig at Waltham stow Youth Club.

I don’t remember Annik at the Nashville Rooms, and only very vaguely recall the interview on the 22nd. But, looking at the dates and knowing the way that things played out and the relationship she and Ian started, well, it must have been a slow-burning thing. There was the small matter of the distance between them, for a start. Not to mention the fact that he was married and probably didn’t want the complications of falling in love again. After all, he had enough on his plate.

I liked Annik, though, and still do. Years later we talked about that interview she did at Dave Pils’ flat. It was featured in
Control
and my character’s sitting there saying dopey things about the name ‘Buzzcocks’, which I hated when I saw it. Made me look a right twat. I told Annik I would never have said anything so daft and she said to me, ‘Ah, but I have the tape, ‘Ooky, and zat is exactly what you said.’

So there you go. You shouldn’t trust a word I say. Both Bernard and I had a go at bagging Annik, actually, but she got the measure of us straight away and we were both a bit pissed off when Ian got her. Not that they were ever lovers. I suppose he couldn’t because of all the pills he was on, or maybe didn’t want to... How romantic. It was just another one of those things – something else that maybe used to gnaw at him.

Even so, he still used to cop off. He got caught with a girl in one of the riggers’ caravans at the Futurama festival in Leeds (I’ve read that Annik was also there that day, which suggests that they hadn’t quite got it together by then). But he’d always be complaining that he couldn’t get a hard-on. It was hardly surprising he couldn’t get it up, really; he was on that many pills it’s a wonder he didn’t rattle. We used to take the piss:
‘How come you’re still copping off when you can’t even get a hard-on? Stealing them off us?’ But I think he did it just because he could. I mean, there you are, you’re the front man of a band and girls always go for the front man. For ages nobody gave a fuck and no girls wanted to sleep with us. But suddenly they did give a fuck and did want to sleep with us. This sort of thing doesn’t get talked about a lot, because it’s a bit unsavoury and it’s not a part of Ian’s character that anybody wants to dwell on, but he was no angel in that regard. No shrinking violet. He was poetic and romantic and soulful – of course he was – but he was still a guy in a band and he liked to do what guys in bands do. Which is to cop off with girls and have a laugh. I do think that’s why God gave us bands – so ugly blokes can cop off.

What gets me sometimes about the deification of Ian is that it suggests a real division between Ian and the rest of the band that in reality wasn’t there. I’ve no doubt he was different with us than he was with Debbie and Annik, because that was the people-pleaser in him. The Ian who was with Debbie is the one she talks about in her book; he’s the one in
Control
, and you see the Annik-Ian there, too. But what you don’t see – and what’s never really come out – is the Ian we saw in the band. That’s because it doesn’t fit neatly into the myth, which prefers the idea that Ian existed on another plane to the rest of us. But he didn’t. He loved the lifestyle and would have indulged way, way more if it hadn’t been for his epilepsy. He loved the music, and he loved the group. He was our mate. When Terry discovered this unusual-looking turd that somebody had left in the toilets at the Leigh Open Air Festival, and made us all look at it because it was so massive – like a pile of Swiss rolls, the most unbelievable turd I’ve ever seen in my life – Ian didn’t go scurrying off to bury his head in a Dostoyevsky, much as he’d have liked Annik or Debbie to think that’s how he’d have reacted. No, he was laughing just as hard and was just as grossed-out as all of us. Just like one of the lads.

I think in that sense we definitely had the best of him and you have to spare a thought for Debbie. We’d deliver Ian home and he’d be fucked. That’s what you do as a group: you pick them up, take them away, drop them back off and let someone else pick up the pieces. With Ian being married, an epileptic and a new father, that wasn’t easy. They argued. Ian and Debbie argued like cat and dog, actually. They had a car, a Morris Traveller, the one with wood on the sides; it was
only ever Debbie who drove it and to be honest we always avoided getting in it with them because they’d always be shouting at each other. Following them in Steve’s Cortina we’d see them ripping into each other, all the hand movements that go with it, car swerving all over the road: both screaming, both as bad as each other. You’ve got to look at it from both sides. It must have been hard for them. For him, the eternal people-pleaser, trying to juggle his two lives. For her, always having to pick up the pieces and probably having nothing to show for it. After all, it wasn’t like he was bringing home much money as a sweetener.

He hid a lot of the bad stuff from us. The domestic problems, the fits – he fitted much more at home than he did with the band, apparently, which would have been something else to contend with. I really do feel sorry for Debbie, having to put up with all of that. Especially when we got the nice bloke, the good-lad Ian, who was coming on in leaps and bounds, his confidence growing all the time, the adulation building, and she got the exhausted, coming-down Ian, who probably wanted nothing to do with nappies and bills and all of that. Who just wanted to be back on the road with his group, playing music and soaking up all the worship.

You could see how much we were coming along when you see the
Something Else
footage. We were feeling very confident by this point, and even had a backdrop. Rob had paid 100 quid for it, wanting us to look good for our first ever national TV spot. The Jam were on that day, too, and I remember waiting to go on and Paul Weller coming up to me and saying, ‘Are you the support band?’