Read Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division Online
Authors: Peter Hook
Tags: #Punk, #Personal Memoirs, #Music, #Biography & Autobiography, #Genres & Styles, #Composers & Musicians
Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (30 page)
I was like, ‘Whatever.’ He took my amp off me, my
beloved
amp. Me and Iris were going to have our gas cut off otherwise.
So I went back to Rob. ‘Right, you’ll have to buy me an amp now, out of the group’s money, because I haven’t got one. I’ve sold it.’
‘You stupid twat,’ he said. ‘I would have bought it off you. I would have given you the money.’
‘Well I asked and you wouldn’t give it me.’
‘Oh don’t be so fucking soft, Hooky.’
What the fuck was ‘soft’ about that I don’t know and never will. But anyway. That was the story of the amp. It really did contribute to the sound of the album, without a shadow of a doubt. I wonder where it is now. While we’re on the subject of amplifiers a mention must go to Barney’s acquisition of the Vox UL730, a wonderful find. This amp has a fantastic sound and was his pride and joy, and again added a lot to the album. Even Martin loved it. It famously took over a whole PA at Liverpool Eric’s once. We’d all been complaining about how loud it was, so Barney had bought an Altair power soak, which supposedly enabled you to have the same sound only quieter. I don’t want to get too technical, but the idea was you used the Altair to quieten the amp then took a DI from it to the PA. This we did, but the UL730 obviously had ideas of its own and took over the whole sound system. You could hear nothing else. This amp was stolen with all the gear in America on the first New Order tour. Even I grieved.
‘She’s Lost Control’
She walked upon the edge of no escape . . .
They used an aerosol to create some of the drum effects – another of Martin’s many innovations. He liked to record different sounds that he’d work on to sound like drums but different. For one of the tracks he recorded us kicking a flight-case in time. Also I suspect a Ring Modulator on the real damped snare. The other thing you hear on this track is Steve’s Synare, which was a drum synthesizer with a white-noise generator that he used on both ‘She’s Lost Control’ and ‘Insight’. He was one of the first drummers to use them, if I’m not mistaken. That was one of the great things about him – and Barney, actually. They’re both very experimental, always wanting to try out new things, which I must admit I resisted because I was always like, ‘Let’s just play. We play great together. What do you want to add stuff for?’ In Barney’s case it was a bit of a two-edged sword because, while it was great that he was always on the lookout to do things differently, you did tend to feel that he wasn’t entirely happy with you. He loved all this new technology, and always did the whole time I knew him, but the technology was reducing the need for players. They say that’s why drum machines were invented, so the lead vocalist didn’t have to talk to the drummer. Bass synths so that the singer doesn’t have to talk to the bass player. You could just programme them yourself and find yourself in your own little world while we’re all hanging on for grim death. I never believed in any of that. I always believed that in a group the strength comes from the camaraderie, the chemistry, the people playing together. You should never exclude anybody; you should encourage rather than exclude. No song is worth alienating a group member.
Ian was apparently moved to write this lyric after an incident at work. It’s about an epileptic young lady who was having problems finding and keeping a job, who eventually died while fitting. That must have been terrifying for him. The first I knew of that was when Bernard mentioned it on a Joy Division documentary. Again, I wasn’t really paying that much attention to the lyrics. It’s teamwork. You just see your teammate doing his bit; he looks and sounds up to speed, so, great, that leaves you to concentrate on your own side of things. There’s no analysis going on. Nobody was going, ‘Let’s have a look at your lyrics, Ian. Let’s have a talk about them. Let’s dissect the lyric.’ He probably would have
just gone mad and told you to fuck off. He delivered his vocals with the perfect amount of passion and spirit, exactly what we wanted. Saying that, reading the lyrics now, his use of repetition and onomatopoeic delivery is startling.
Now, of course, Ian Curtis is recognized as one of music’s greatest lyricists, a fact that wasn’t established during his lifetime. In interviews all they seem to pounce on was the Nazi aspects. That just used to upset him. It’s a funny thing with interviews. When you’re a struggling band nobody wants to know, so you just live without the press. You don’t even consider it to be important. All of a sudden you’re popular and everybody wants to talk to you. Then it seems vital.
‘Shadowplay’
As the assassins all grouped in four lines dancing on the floor . . .
This was the song that Barney wanted to sound like ‘The Ocean’ by Velvet Underground. Again, the lyric doesn’t repeat until the end and it has no chorus, which is something that I think Ian was very, very good at – the way he played with the structure of the lyrics but without ever losing what it was about the song that makes it strong. You don’t listen to it and think,
Ah, what an interesting lyrical structure.
But it’s all in the song. His love of art was showing here. The way he wanted to slightly subvert the normal conventions of rock and pop.
‘Wilderness’
I travelled far and wide to stations of the cross . . .
I’m blowing my own trumpet here, but this is a fantastic bass line. I watched John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers play it acoustically at their gig at the MEN Arena. I think I can safely say that, of the 19,000 people there, 18,950 didn’t know what it was – but I did, and it brought a tear to my eye, definitely. Monster bass line. A bass line that every bass player dreams of and I got it, so thank you.
It’s Ian’s sideswipe at religion, the futility of religion, the things that are done and perpetrated in it name. It’s poetry. Once you unlock the meaning of the lyrics, or at least what you think is the meaning of the lyrics, you can lose yourself in them. Each one of his lyrics is like a wonderful little story in itself. Rob didn’t like this track.
Great guitar, too. The two instruments interplay very well. I do think that Barney’s guitar playing is underrated. He’s a fantastic guitarist. One of the things that puzzled me when he started working with Johnny Marr is why he gave up the guitar. I prefer his playing. Maybe it’s that thing about always wanting to move on to something else, whereas I’ve always been quite happy to capitalize on what I’ve got. This reminds me of when I got Donald Johnson of Certain Ratio to teach me how to do slap bass. Everyone was doing it and I was feeling the pressure, shall we say. I tried once, one lesson; he just laughed, squeezed my arm and said, ‘Hooky, stick to what you’re great at!’ Lovely guy.
‘Interzone’
Four twelve windows, ten in a row . . .
Me singing the main vocal while Ian does the low, backing vocal. Ian was very good like that; there seemed to be no ego with him. He was perfectly happy to let you sing, to let anyone sing. In fact he’d encourage you to do it. He was very, very generous in that respect. Strangely enough we were always trying to get Barney to sing but he was never interested.
This was the song that they tried to get us to do at RCA. The cover of ‘Keep On Keepin’ On’ – well, not the actual song itself but the inspiration for it – and you can hear the riff in it a little.
‘I Remember Nothing’
Violent more violent his hand cracks the chair . . .
We had been playing this one for a while very loosely; it had no real order. So we jammed it in the studio and Martin added the shattering glass and other effects. This was also Barney’s first foray into using the Transcendent 2000. He’d bought
Sound Engineer
magazine, or
Sound International
or something, and you got a free piece of electronic kit every week – the idea being to build your own synthesizer, which is what he’d done; he soldered together the Transcendent 2000. Built it himself: quite an achievement. It’s used a lot on the track. One of the interesting things about Joy Division is that people can never tell who’s playing what; is it guitar or bass, keyboard or bass or guitar? This is a great, atmospheric track and came together very quickly. In the New
Order days, especially towards the end, we’d hammer our tracks to death. Budgeting a month a track to record. You’d try everything bar the kitchen sink and end up mainly coming back to exactly what you started with. Then it was blighted by the huge waste of time and money. Ending up with everyone in the group hating each other. We should have just looked at
Unknown Pleasure
s and made every album that way. We’d probably never have split up. But people change. Ah well, last thing is the notable use of the Frank Sinatra lyric ‘Strangers’.
JANUARY–DECEMBER 1979
January 1979
The
A Factory Sample
EP (FAC 2) is released, priced £1.50. Recorded at Cargo Studios, Rochdale. Produced by Martin Hannett. Track list (Side A (Aside)): Joy Division, ‘Digital’; Joy Division, ‘Glass’. (Vinyl etching: ‘EVERYTHING’. ) Track list (Side B (Beside)): the Durutti Column, ‘No Communication’; the Durutti Column, ‘Thin Ice (Detail)’. (Vinyl etching: ‘IS REPAIRABLE’.) Track list (Side C (Seaside)): John Dowie, ‘Acne’; John Dowie, ‘Idiot’; John Dowie, ‘Hitler’s Liver’. (Vinyl etching: ‘EVERYTHING’.) Track list (Side D (Decide)): Cabaret Voltaire, ‘Baader Meinhof’; Cabaret Voltaire, ‘Sex in Secret’. (Vinyl etching: ‘IS BROKEN’.)
6 January 1979
Kevin Cummins takes his famous Princess Parkway shots of Joy Division.
“I remember it was really cold and I borrowed that coat that I had on. I think I borrowed it off Steve, actually. They were done really quickly. Kevin freely admits he only took seven shots. He was lucky. He didn’t have any money either – didn’t have money for any more film. He had one roll and he had to do four or five groups on it. Quite punky really. I mean, now, you sit there, they take fucking thousands of shots and wade through them to get one. But in the old days you had to get it finished and get it out. You know what I’m going to say, don’t you? That’s right. I liked it much better that way.”
12 January 1979
Joy Division play Wythenshawe College, Manchester.
13 January 1979
Ian Curtis appears on the cover of the
NME
; the shot of him smoking was taken during the Kevin Cummins session on 6 January.
23 January 1979
Ian Curtis diagnosed with epilepsy.
26 January 1979
Joy Division play the
A Factory Sample
EP release party, the Factory, Russell Club, Manchester, with Cabaret Voltaire and John Dowie.
31 January 1979
Joy Division’s first John Peel session, produced by Bob Sargeant for the BBC. Tracks recorded: ‘Exercise One’, ‘Insight’, ‘Transmission’, ‘She’s Lost Control’.
“We weren’t quite as green as we used to be in terms of being in the studio, so, instead of just sitting around watching other people get on with it, we were a bit more hands-on, happy that we were getting to use this great studio and were being treated well with a
trip to the subsidized canteen. I loved that session. I love working for the BBC, actually.”
2 February 1979
Sid Vicious found dead of a drugs overdose.
10 February 1979
Joy Division play the Institute of Technology, Bolton, supported by the Curbs.
“Little Hulton’s right next to Bolton so I had to drive all the way to Salford to get the gear, pick everybody up and then drive past my house to do the gig. At the end of the night, when we’d finished, I had to drive past my house, drop everybody off, go all the way to Salford and then back home. Fuck me. Who’d be the driver, eh?”
16 February 1979
Joy Division play Eric’s, Liverpool, supported by Cabaret Voltaire.
28 February 1979
Joy Division play Nottingham Playhouse as unbilled support for John Cooper Clarke.
Joy Division were late appearing, so John Cooper Clarke went on first, then introduced Joy Division (his distinctive accent leading at least one fan, Dominic, writing on joydiv.org, to expect ‘Geordie Vision’); John Cooper Clarke then played a second time.
“We were using Sad Café’s PA, which was operated by my cousin, Chas Banks – who was the first person to ever give me a guitar to hold, when I went round to his house in Stretford. I was fourteen. Fantastic guy, a real legend. We were waiting for the PA to turn up – you can’t do anything until the PA turns up – and I remember being
at the back door when Chas appeared, bruised and battered, and went, ‘Just crawled in from a motorway wreck; let’s get on with it.’ We went out and the van was fucking hammered. It had been in a huge crash on the motorway. All the gear was trashed and everyone was frantically trying to put it back together. Proper rock ‘n’ roll. That was why John ended up going on twice: because we weren’t ready.”