by Peter Hook
I was enrolled at Stowell Memorial School and loved it. I was happy. Mum and Bill got married – we stayed at home with Granny that day – and not long after that it was announced that he’d been offered a new job. So we were moving. The job was with Jamaica Glassworks and that’s where we were going: we were moving to Jamaica.
In 1962, this was. Bill went on ahead, and a few days later me, Mum, Chris and all our worldly goods travelled down to Southampton, me clinging on to a plastic bag of toy soldiers. There was a very big storm and because of the bad weather we had to get a tug out to the boat. We were all petrified by the size of waves, the noise of the engines and the sailors bawling at us as they hauled us aboard the ship. Then when it came to my turn the plastic bag tore and my soldiers all spilt out into the stormy sea, leaving me holding the tattered bag.
Then there was the crossing. Oh my God.
You have to bear in mind that my mother, right up until the day she died, was the most conservative eater imaginable. She could hardly bear to eat anything that came from south of Salford. So when we ended up on an Italian cruise liner going to Jamaica she was freaked out because there was only one thing she could eat, which meant there was only one thing me and our kid could eat, too: chicken and chips. I still love chicken and chips now, funnily enough – dry, with a bit of salt and lots of pepper – but God only knows why because it never fails to remind me of being on that ship. For seventeen days that’s all we had: chicken and chips. At the kids’ dinner we’d watch the ice statues being carved and the huge cakes being laid out for the adult sitting later, but my mum said we couldn’t have any cake because they were dirty.
Our Chris was only three. He was a screamer, not a sleeper, and it felt like he screamed all the way to the West Indies. This made us very unpopular – especially in the afternoons, when everyone was trying to snooze on deck. On top of that we were all seasick and hardly came out of the cabin (apart from one notable exception when, running down the corridor, I fell and smashed my nose, blood everywhere). We stopped at some fantastic places, though: Bilbao, Madeira, the Canary Islands and Trinidad. But still we never ate, and always made it back on board for the old chicken and chips. The journey seemed to take forever, but – apart from Chris nearly falling overboard as we docked because he’d seen Bill on the dockside – we arrived safely.
Our accommodation in Jamaica was a rented detached bungalow: three bedrooms and an inside toilet – the first place I ever lived with an inside toilet. All marble floors. One day these two black guys came to the door and asked if they could milk our calabash tree, and in return they’d make maracas for me and our kid. Proper maracas are made out of the fruit of a calabash tree – they empty out the middle bit, put stones inside and there you go. So Mum was like, ‘Yeah whatever,’ and these guys tore into the tree, threw down all the fruit, made us two pairs of maracas – one for me and one for our kid – and fucked off.
Later, all hell broke loose. The tree must have been full of spiders and that night the house was overrun with them, fucking hundreds of them, all over. They were huge, and I bet they were poisonous too. Man eaters, definitely. Bill was racing round killing them while me, Mum and our kid stood on the table screaming. We then beat a retreat to the bedroom, where Bill used a shoe to whack the spiders scuttling under the door as we all stood there wailing. I’m not joking! It was like a horror film. I’m getting the heebie-jeebies now just thinking about it. Hate spiders still – no I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! for me (although I did get asked to audition last year, funnily enough).
Not long after that we moved to 31 Phoenix Avenue, Kingston, which was also a detached bungalow, with fantastic, beautiful grounds where pineapples grew. It too had an inside toilet, and more beautiful marble floors – it even came with staff. We were sent to a private school, Surbiton Preparatory, which was terrifying. The teachers would scream at us to do joined-up writing and spell, which at six you didn’t do in Salford. But we soon settled in and as a great bonus it was too hot in the afternoons to work so school finished at 2.30pm. All in all it should have been pretty idyllic, except that things had started to get a bit shit around that time: firstly between my mum and Bill and secondly in Jamaica, where the locals had got fed up with the Chinese and whites running all the businesses and had started to turf them out – literally storming into shops, chucking out the owners and taking over. At the same time a lot of houses were getting robbed, people were being mugged in the street and there were riots not far from where we lived in Kingston so there was a dangerous air about the place. You’d be on the street watching the cops beat the shit out of the thieves, chasing them down, and when they caught them sitting on them and giving them a good pistol-whipping.
Bill stopped coming home. He was spending a lot of time drinking in the club at the glassworks after his shifts. He was a twat to us but a great friend to everyone else, and one of the only white guys at work who mixed with the black guys. He’d go out drinking with the white guys then carry on with the black guys and reckoned that was why ours was the only house on our street that was never robbed. At night my mum would sit on the veranda with a crate of Red Stripe, waiting for him to come home, getting drunker and angrier, and when he eventually arrived back they’d have a screaming row. Me and our kid would cower behind the sofa, praying for him to die, while they charged around the house screaming at each other and smashing the place to smithereens. He’d beat her up; she’d attack him with her high heel, giving as good as she got; and by the time they’d finished the house would look like a bomb had hit it. The next morning the maid would put it all back together again, so it was nice and tidy for the next fight.
You can’t have everything, though. Mum and Bill knocking lumps out of each other was a small price to pay for the fantastic weather, posh house, car and money. Plus Mum worked for the Jamaica Tourist Board, so we used to get free tickets to all the resorts and hang around in country clubs. You know how I said that life had been black and white in Salford? Well in Jamaica it was definitely in colour.
So what did we do? We returned to Salford.
She was homesick, Mum. That was the problem. She hated the food and she missed her mother and sister. So when Bill’s contract came up for renewal she persuaded him to move back to Salford, which must have caused some mega-arguments, because of course he wanted to stay on in Jamaica. There were rumours about an American woman. I remember one night my mum drunkenly pushing me into our blue Ford Prefect and setting off, bread knife in hand, to kill them both. Trouble was, she couldn’t drive – and I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to learn to drive while holding a bread knife in one hand and a cigarette in the other, but it’s pretty difficult. Luckily, after hopping through a couple of intersections, she thought better of it and hopped us home. I always wonder why she never took our Chris, lucky bugger.
When it came to moving she got her own way, though, (and, knowing my mum, I don’t expect that outcome was ever in doubt) and Bill gave in, probably thinking he’d be able to find a good job back in Manchester. There were a lot of glassworks around and at least they’d saved up enough from working in Jamaica so we were well-off financially.
Or we would have been, but for the fact that on the day we were due to fly home (first time on a plane for me) we were paid a visit by a couple of cops and a ‘tax inspector’ who claimed that Bill had ‘mis-paid’ his taxes. They knew he had the money – he’d drawn it out of the bank to return home – and they weren’t going to let us leave until he paid them. These guys basically screwed all of Bill’s savings out of him, and we came home with nothing.
This was the summer of 1966. I was ten. Everyone else was going mad about England winning the World Cup as we returned from Jamaica, where we’d been for nearly four years, in our posh house with its marble floors, inside toilet and maids, to a two-up, two-down in Salford with an outside toilet and a very unhappy stepdad who never got another job in glass again and who got more and more bitter about it as the years went on.
We moved to back to Granny’s for a while but soon went to Ordsall, just down the road, to 32 Rothwell Street, right by the park passage. They paid £300 or so for it. I went to Regent Road Primary, a mixed school, where my Auntie Jean was a dinner lady, which was great, because not only did I get tons of blancmange but also I’d returned from Jamaica as a bit of an outsider and needed all the allies I could get. In Jamaica the kids were much more advanced than I was, and I’d had to catch up. That meant that I’d returned miles ahead of the other kids back here in Salford. Now I was given a bollocking for doing joined-up writing. It was great: I could really take it easy. I had quite a good time at Regent Road. Again all of Salford was my playground and, apart from a few jibes about my big nose and a crippling shyness with girls, I was quite well behaved and enjoyed myself.
I’m sure that was the reason I passed the Eleven Plus – because I was so well educated compared to the other kids – and in those days you had to be bright to get into grammar school. The way it went back then was that if you failed the Eleven Plus you went to the secondary school, which was where the thickos went, or to the technical college if you were borderline, or the grammar if you were bright. There was no way in hell a thick bastard like me would have got in without an advantage.
I went to Salford Grammar School. This was where I met Barney Dickin (to become Sumner). Eventually we would start Joy Division together, and then New Order. So I’ve got Jamaica to thank for a lifelong love of chicken and chips and a lifelong fear of spiders – but also, in a funny kind of way, for all of that too. How different things could have been if I’d stayed. Would I have suited dreads and reggae?
‘You can take the boy out of Salford but you
can’t take Salford out of the boy’
I met Barney in that first year at Salford Grammar. He still gets really annoyed when I call him Barney.
‘You’re the only fucking person who calls me Barney. Everyone else calls me Bernard,’ he bleats. But at school they used to call him Barney Rubble – this even cropped up in an early Joy Division review – and his surname was Dickin so they took the piss out of him about that, too, as you can imagine. He changed it to Sumner after he finished school.
Barney wasn’t in my class, though. He wasn’t even in the same house. I was in Lancaster and he was in Gloucester, the other two being Warwick and York. There were a few lessons we shared, but not many. My first memory of him is standing outside the gym and him coming up, and I just went, ‘All right?’ and he went, ‘All right?’ and that was it; that was the first time we had any kind of contact. No indication that we’d be spending the rest of our lives together, in one way or another, and change the world of music not once but twice. Even then we didn’t really become friends at first, not really until the third year, when we both became skinheads.
A pair of right bastards we were too. Always in trouble. I hate to admit it now, but I was a bit of bully. There was a pecking order and you had to keep to it. I mean, I wasn’t the biggest – nowhere near, not by a long way – but I hung around with them and that kind of behaviour rubs off – peer pressure, as they say – and I did my bit. We all did. Plus, I was a thief. Oh my God, was I a thief.
It was quite normal where I lived, to steal, because basically we had nothing. Not that I’m excusing it, mind you. I mean, my mum had nothing and she was as honest as the day was long – she once found a ten-bob note on King Street and stood there for two hours to see if anybody came back looking for it. And I’m certainly not claiming that I became a tea-leaf because I didn’t get any affection from my parents, because nobody got affection in those days. But there it was. I was one. A thief.
Got nabbed for it, too, loads of times. Always getting beaten up by the coppers. Back then, if you got caught shoplifting, you got a good kicking from the police and you didn’t do it again. Well, you did do it again, but you know what I mean – we didn’t have to go to court and all that bollocks. The coppers just used to beat the shit out of you. Nowadays they’re kittens, aren’t they? Waste of time.
I remember once we’d done this bookies over, which – before you chuck this book away in disgust – isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. It’s not like we barged in there with sawn-offs and stockings on our heads; there was never any of that, never any violence – we were only thirteen after all. No, it was just that Salford at that time was being redeveloped: all the houses were being emptied, so what you had was a lot of crofts – which are bomb sites from the war, where a building’s been blown up and then cleared – and derelict houses. There was one particular row of empty houses with a bookies (or bookmaker’s or betting office, whichever you like) at the end of it. So what we did, me and my mates, was get some tools from somewhere and just break through the wall. It took us about a week to chip away enough bricks to make a hole big enough to crawl through, but that didn’t matter because there was nothing else to do. I mean, we were bored to death; we’d do anything for a bit of excitement, and we’d had enough of lighting bonfires and larking about in the empty houses. So we spent about a week carving out this hole, then squeezed through – only to find that the bookies was more or less empty. Later we were in the doorway of another shop, just messing about, as you do, and the police came screaming up. We scattered and they chased us. I ran down a back alley, pulling over all the dustbins behind me so the coppers were tripping up on them. But when I came out of the alley at the other end another copper tripped me up and sent me flying. He picked me up, put me in the van, kicked the shit out of me, took me to the station and did it again. I think I confessed to every crime ever committed in Salford that night. Then I got another battering off my mam when she had to come and get me. Ouch.
We stole from the Canada Dry warehouse. Used to wriggle through open windows into the factory at night and pass out a load of stuff. Next day I’d go into school with tins of cola and lemonade, sell them for 5p each, then treat everyone to the chippy at dinnertime. Shops, too, of course. In those days shops were in people’s houses: you’d go in, the bell would tinkle and some creaky old dear would get up from the front room and shuffle into the shop, and by the time they appeared half the stock would have disappeared. I’d sell it at school. ‘Cakes, Biscuits. What do you want? Pens? I’ve got hundreds of pens.’
You know what? It was the same being in a group. Just goes to show that you can take the boy out of Salford but you can’t take Salford out of the boy, because we were terrible for nicking things in Joy Division and New Order. We used to go to these wonderful gigs with all this beautiful stuff backstage and nick it all. Now you’ve got bands like the Happy Mondays, or Oasis (in the early days), who had big scally reputations, but they had the same background as us: just working class thieves. You never had anything so you took it. Same attitude to music: you’ve got to start somewhere. The difference was that nobody expected that sort of behaviour from us in Joy Division or New Order because we had the arty intellectual image. These days I restrict it to hotels.
Back at school, the thievery lasted only a couple of years, until I got interested in girls. Meanwhile, me and Barney had become mates. He was funny. He’s got this really northern, evil sense of humour and he loves playing practical jokes (can’t take them, mind, as you’ll discover), and together we were bad lads. Like I said, we were both skinheads by then and we used to hang around with the school hard-nuts. His best mate, Baz Benson, was the cock of our school and my best mate from Regent Road, Dave Ward, was cock of the technical school, which was just across the playing fields from Salford Grammar. They’d take people’s dinner money and buy shit with it, get into fights, terrorize the teachers, all of that. We never used to do our homework. Fuck that, we just took it off the swots in the morning, gave them a cuff and copied it in the cloakroom.
We went back to school, me and Barney, years later. We were doing an article for the NME and the photographer was going on about how it would be great to get some pictures of us at our old school. So we were like, ‘Right, mate,’ and w
ent and picked this guy up and drove over to Salford Grammar. But for some reason he hadn’t organized it properly. I think he may have phoned up the cleaner or something, who would have been like, ‘Who’s the group? No Order? Are they famous? “Blue Monday”? Never heard of it. Oh, bring ‘em along anyway.’
So we turned up, me and Barney in our leather jackets, biker boots on –1982 or 1983, this was, so we were still pretty punky. But however weird we looked was nothing compared to how weird we felt trooping up to the gates of our old school. It had become a comprehensive by then but otherwise hadn’t changed at all: there were still the same grand old 1960s buildings, and they still had all the old prize cups in the cases, the wood panelling and pictures of all the head boys on the walls. What blew our minds was how it all looked the same except so much smaller. We were like, ‘Fucking hell, this is wild being back here.’ It even smelt the same.
We reached the headmaster’s office and the guy from NME said to the secretary, ‘Oh hello, I’ve got Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner here from the successful group New Order, and they’re old boys from the school. We just wondered if it was possible to take their pictures in the hall for the New Musical Express, the biggest music paper in England.’
She was nice enough, quite excited really, and said, ‘If you wait one second I’ll just ask the headmaster.’ And she disappeared off into his office. Then all of a sudden we heard, ‘What? That pair of dickheads!’ Then the office door flew open and out burst our old geography teacher, Dave Cain, now the headmaster, roaring at us: ‘You pair of bastards!’
