Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (9 page)

We drove to Middleton College to give him the good news to his face – it’s where Steve Coogan went, funnily enough, a famous college in the area – and made our way up to his dorm, only to find him and his mates flicking each other’s bare arses with their towels. If we’d had any doubts about sacking him they were laid to rest at the sight of that, because offhand I can’t actually think of anything less ‘us’ than a wet-towel fight.

Out of breath from his jolly larks he came bounding up to us: ‘All right, lads! How’s it going?’

‘We think you’re too good for us,’ we said as rehearsed, heads down. ‘You know, the sound we’re going for, you know, it’s . . . And . . . You’re too . . . Good.’

‘Right,’ he beamed and ran back to whipping his mates’ arses with his towel while we sloped off to wrestle with the thorny issue of finding another drummer – an issue that was about to get even thornier: we had our first gig coming up.

When we’d started the group, me and Bernard had got in touch with Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks. (I can’t remember how – he must have given us his phone number.) We met him in a pub in Broughton where we picked his brains. We were a bit star-struck, a bit in awe of him because he was in a band and they were like Manchester punk royalty, but mainly we were just pleased that he’d agreed to see us, because in those days there were no books on starting a band. You couldn’t go on a course or look it up on the Internet. Being in a group gave you instant social-leper status. It meant you were ostracized by
your family and shunned by passing strangers in the street, and your workmates made no bones about what they thought of it all.

‘Why do you want to be in a group? Fuck off, do some work why don’t you?’

So to actually talk to someone with first-hand experience was very valuable. And, though the Manchester punk scene would go on to resemble a snake-pit of petty jealousy, backbiting and rivalry, the Buzzcocks and especially Pete seemed above all that. Right from the word go they were about being inclusive – the proper punk ethos. It was just the rest of us who squabbled like kids over a bag of sweets.

Because we’d met up with Pete, and because Pete was a nice, gracious guy, he’d ask me and Bernard how it was going. We told him that Ian was really working out as a lead singer, which was good because Pete knew Ian, too, and Pete asked us if we’d like a support slot with the Buzzcocks, and even though we still didn’t have a name that we all liked, and we were ‘between drummers’, we virtually bit his hand off. This was it. This was what we were getting ready for.

The first thing we did was work on the look. I went shopping with Terry at the Army & Navy Store on Tib Street, where a black plastic cap set me back 50p.

‘You have to have a gimmick, our Peter,’ as my mother always said. These were probably her only words of advice about the band other than, ‘You should give it all up and settle down.’ (I remember once arriving late for my Sunday lunch at home because I’d been doing an interview for the
NME
in town. When I told her I thought she’d go mad: dinner was ruined. Instead she burst out crying, hugged me and said, ‘At last. You’re getting a proper job!’ That was in 1986.) But it wasn’t bad advice as it goes and that was my gimmick at first: the cap and a moustache. Terry, who by now was trying his hand at being our manager/roadie, got his tank commander’s goggles; Barney no doubt invested in a fresh supply of Scout clothes from the Scout shop, and of course Ian had his own Ian thing going on. One thing they got dead right in
Control
, actually, was how Ian looked. He didn’t go in for the jackboots (ex-German army, £3.50 a pair from Tib Street; wore them for years) or the tank hats or Scout stuff. He was just Ian, and he was always much cooler than us without really trying to be. Just was.

Next we needed a new name, Stiff Kittens being too ‘London punk’. We chose Warsaw. Just like that. For any group the name’s your most important thing, definitely as important as the music, and I’ve always found it tough to choose one. But Warsaw was a piece of piss, far easier than any of the name changes that came later. We picked it because it was cold and austere. It was either that or Berlin, and because we all liked ‘Warszawa’, the track on Bowie’s
Low
, we chose that. Too late for Richard Boon, though: the Buzzcocks’ manager had been screaming at us for a name but by the time we eventually we came up with Warsaw it was too late, or so he said, and he’d gone with Stiff Kittens on the poster. This annoyed us and kind of led to us falling out with the Buzzcocks a bit – because we would have been very, well,
vocal
about our annoyance.

But we still didn’t have a drummer. For a while it looked like we might have to cancel the gig or maybe even go back to the wet-towel kid, but in the end we got a guy called Tony Tabac, who we recruited a night or two before the gig. Nothing like cutting it fine; it was straight in at the deep end for him. Quite a nice guy he was, too, and a good drummer. I remember his audition: a bit meat-and-potatoes, but good – and he’d decorated his bass drum with all kinds of shit, like dimps and fag packets, which we liked because it looked punky.

On 29 May 1977, at the Electric Circus, the band played their first-ever gig, supporting Penetration and the Buzzcocks. Tony Wilson was in the audience, as well as Paul Morley, who by this time was writing for the
NME
and was impressed by Warsaw’s ‘twinkling evil charm’. ‘The bass player had a moustache,’ he later wrote. ‘I like them and will like them more in six months’ time.’ Photographer Kevin Cummins was also there, as well as Steve Shy of local fanzine
Shy Talk
; John the Postman, who led the crowd in a rendition of ‘Louie Louie’ at the end of the night; and punk poet John Cooper Clarke, who performed after Warsaw.

I remember driving there in the afternoon, and I remember getting there and loading the gear in. I don’t remember the sound check. We had one, I think, but we had no idea what to do because we’d never done one before. No one had the foggiest.

Not knowing what to do made it exciting, though. Like, now, everybody’s got a stage manager and a sound guy, lights, etc. The bands know
all about sound-checks and levels, equipment and all that. Now they even have music schools to teach you that kind of stuff. Back then you knew fuck all. You didn’t have anyone professional, just your mates, who, like you, were clueless; you had a disco PA and a sleepy barmaid. It’s something I find quite sad about groups today, funnily enough, the careerism of it all. I saw this programme once, a ‘battle of the bands’ sort of thing. It had Alex James from Blur on it and Lauren Laverne and some twat from a record company, and they’d sit there saying what they thought of the band: ‘Your bass player’s shit and your image needs work; lose the harmonica player.’

All the bands just stood there and took it, going, ‘Cheers, man, we’ll go off and do that.’

I couldn’t believe it. I joined a band to tell everyone to fuck off, and if somebody said to me, ‘Your image is shit,’ I’d have gone, ‘Fuck off, knob-head!’ And if someone had said, ‘Your music’s shit,’ I would have nutted them. That to me is what’s lacking in groups. They’ve missed out that growing-up stage of being bloody-minded and fucking clueless. You have to have ultimate self-belief. You have to believe right from the word go that you’re great and that the rest of the world has to catch up with you. Of us lot, Ian was the best at that. He believed in Joy Division completely. If any of us got downhearted it was always him who would gee us up and get us going again. He’d put you back on track.

Anyway back to our first gig. Clueless or not, we got set up. The changing rooms were in the old projection rooms. (Not that we ever changed clothes as such – in fact we used to look down on bands who did. I bet those bands on the Alex James programme ‘change’ . . . ) I remember walking down the steps to the stage, and Ian saying, ‘We’re not Stiff Kittens. We’re Warsaw,’ and that was it – we were off – and I can’t remember a thing more about it because I was so frightened. When we came off we felt we’d done okay and there was a lot of relief that we’d got through it, that first step of playing in front of people. Because it’s the weirdest sensation: I mean, I find it pretty weird even when I do it now, to be honest . . .

Warsaw’s next gig was on 31 May at Rafters on Oxford Street, supporting the Heartbreakers, who were fronted by Johnny Thunders, an ex-member of proto-punks the New York Dolls. The Heartbreakers had arrived in the
UK in time to ride the punk wave and found themselves much admired by the English groups. Their heroin use, however, was legendary.

Getting that gig was a massive thrill. You’ve got to remember that in those days we played just to play. It didn’t matter that we weren’t getting paid: we did it anyway, and fucking loved it. I’d get so worked up before a gig that I had to run off the excitement. There was that much adrenalin in me I just had to get rid of it somehow and I’d set off running like Forest fuckin’ Gump. And supporting Johnny Thunders was mega because, well, he was Johnny Thunders out of the New York Dolls; I was a huge fan. He was American. The Heartbreakers were the first group we’d met who we didn’t already know, which made them otherworldly, as far as we were concerned.

So when we got in to Rafters in the afternoon, loaded our gear in raring to go, dead excited to be meeting the Heartbreakers, we were very surprised to find them all laid out on the seats. Sparkled, comatose, passed out.

We stood there looking at them, mouths hanging open, thinking, ‘Oh my God! How you can be in a group and be
asleep
?’ There’s me, so excited to be doing a gig I was charging about. There’s the Heart-breakers, so hungover or smacked-up or whatever, just laying there. We couldn’t believe it.

What’s more, it became our problem, because we had to wait until they’d sound-checked before we could do anything, and it took something like four hours for them to get their shit together. They had road crew, but the road crew were just as wasted, and it was like the lot of them were running on half speed, like watching punk skeletons staggering in slow motion, and as a result we never got to sound check. When they eventually played they were almost as much of a shambles on stage as they’d been during the afternoon. During their set they played ‘Chinese Rocks’, which was their big hit, three times. I was looking at the crowd, thinking,
You’re pissed off? We’ve had to put up with this all day.

So it was a bit disillusioning, really, because we’d thought it would be like before, with the Buzzcocks, where everybody was dead excited and enthusiastic and planning on changing the world. But it wasn’t. These guys could barely stay awake let alone change the world. It was a relief to get back to ‘our world’ for our next gig.

This was where Barney’s infamous sleeping bag made its first appearance. We had been invited by Penetration to support them, the Adverts and Harry Hack & the Big G at Newcastle Town Hall. It was the first time we’d used borrowed equipment, meaning we had to walk on, plug in and play, so we sounded dreadful, and I think also the first time we got paid. Twenty quid. I’d asked Danny McQueeney to drive us up there in his three-and-a-half-ton van, which just had three seats in the front. Obviously there was me, Barney, Ian, Tony, Terry and Danny, which makes six; so this meant that three of us had to go in the back. one of them being me. Now, if you’ve never been in the back of a three-and-a-half-ton van all the way from Manchester to Newcastle, let me tell you, it’s like being locked in a box. A freezing box. Newcastle’s a long way. It was hell. So, when the gig ended and Danny announced that he was too pissed to drive back (and none of us was insured to drive), we weren’t too fussed about postponing the hellish journey back and staying the night.

Until it got cold, that is. Really. Fucking. Cold. One minute we were milling around outside the van where we’d parked – under the big Tyne Bridge, just by the docks – still a bit pissed and having a laugh. Next thing you know, about 4am, the temperature had dropped and we were diving in the van for any shred of warmth. Then we watched in amazement as Bernard first got a deckchair out, and next wrapped a scarf around his neck and put a hat on. Then pulled out a sleeping bag, wriggled into it and settled himself into his chair for the night. Slack-jawed, we were, green with envy and turning blue with the cold, wishing that we’d thought of bringing warm clothes and wondering why Barney had thought of it.

We couldn’t put the heater on. There was only just enough fuel to get us back as it was. So for the rest of the night we took turns trying to kip in the cab, where it was warmest, and Barney sat there, snug as a bug and twice as smug, while we froze. Whoever it was who said that ‘no man is an island’ never met Bernard.

Around this time we played at the Squat in Devas Street. The Squat was in an almost derelict building in the middle of wasteland off Oxford Road. It had been part of the Royal Manchester College of Music but it became a punk venue, only a really rough one – really dingy – where you could just turn up and play, and there would always be more people from bands than there were audience in there. We played with
the Drones, the Negatives, the Fall and the Worst, a real gathering of Manchester punks that was, for the Stuff the Jubilee festival. Suddenly it felt like we were part of something. Us, the Fall, the Worst: after the Buzzcocks and Slaughter & the Dogs we were the next wave of punk bands and we’d be following each other around for years.

Word was beginning to spread about Warsaw, with the second Squat gig, on 25 June, reviewed for
Sounds
by Tony Moon, who wrote, ‘[Warsaw] have slightly better gear than the Worst and since they have done a couple more gigs are a bit tighter. Tony Tabac is on drums [ . . . ] he only joined a few weeks ago. Pete Hook is on bass/plastic cap, Barney Rubble is on guitar and Ian Curtis is the voice. Lotsa action and jumping in the air [ . . . ] to [ . . . ] ‘Tension’, ‘The Kill’.’

Bernard never referred to himself as Barney Rubble and it’s unclear where that name originated outside of Salford Grammar. The gig would also be Tony Tabac’s last, as he was arrested shortly afterwards.