by Peter Hook
Oh dear – we used to make his life a misery.
‘Get out!’ he screamed at us. ‘Get out, you pair of twats!’
And you know what? Straight away we were schoolkids again. It was like going back in a time machine. In a flash we were out of there, the head on our tails, clattering along the old wooden corridors in our jackboots. Not a word of a lie: we had to run off the premises, laughing hysterically, kicked out by our old geography teacher.
Not to be outdone, we skulked back when the coast was clear; the NME guy going slowly nuts because he needed to get his picture. Outside the school was a board with the name of the school on it. The photographer thought this board would make a nice image, so he positioned us near it, one either side, and got ready to take his picture. But the head must have been keeping watch, because all of a sudden we heard, ‘Oi, you! I thought I told you pair of bastards to fuck off!’
Again he came charging out. Again we legged it. The NME guy was still pointing his camera at the sign but we were off, so he still couldn’t take the picture he wanted – all he managed to get was a Polaroid, which I still have. We ended up doing the proper photoshoot near Barney’s old flat in Greengate, Broughton.
Anyway. Just before I left school, in 1973, I was sent to see the careers teacher, who said, ‘So what do you want to do?’
‘I want to be in a group.’ I think I’d seen Led Zeppelin the night before or something . . .
He rolled his eyes, reached across the desk and cuffed me round the head. Then, as I sat there rubbing my sore head, he said, ‘Do you want to get your hands dirty or not?’
And I went, ‘Well, not really.’
‘All right then,’ he sighed. ‘Obviously you want to go and work in an office. Well, we’ve got either Salford Town Hall or Manchester Town Hall. Which is it to be?’
Well I lived in Salford, so I went for an interview at Salford Town Hall. Now don’t forget I was a complete prick at school – I’d done no work whatsoever, and the only exam I was likely to pass was English. So when the guy at Salford Town Hall said to me, ‘Are you going to pass your O Levels?’ I said, ‘No, not really. I think I might get one or two if I’m lucky, but I don’t think I’ll get the others.’
‘Right – get out, y’bastard,’ he said, and threw me out.
So off I went off to Manchester Town Hall, where the guy said to me, ‘Are you going to pass your O Levels?’
And I went, ‘Yeah, course I am. Going to get ‘em all. Six guaranteed. No problem.’
And he said, ‘Right, okay, you’ve got the job.’
Bloody hell, that was easy.
I got a Grade 6 in English lit. at O Level – a pass, just – but that was it. I even failed technical drawing, my favourite subject. The teacher, Cup Cake we called him, a right daft old dodderer, hadn’t realized that there were two papers and gave us the second one right before the time ran out. When we complained he just said, ‘Tough.’ Barney did art. They always said that if you were awake you passed art, so he got two O Levels – art and English – and I got only one, because I didn’t do art. This became just one of many on-going rivalries between us.
I’d had a job before. When I was fourteen my Auntie Jean got me work cleaning offices in Quay House in Manchester. I worked for a company called Whipclean and many of my friends joined me. It was a valuable part of our education, working with all the old saucy women – Auntie Jean even had the dubious honour of being the first woman I ever heard swear. That was a great job: £1.75 a week for ten hours’ work; it gave me the money to be a well-dressed suedehead. But this job at Manchester Town Hall was my first proper job. I got £8 a week. My room was 234, where I worked under an old guy called Mr Wilson who used to smoke a pipe all day. Quite ironic, really, considering the part a certain other Mr Wilson was to play in my life.
‘What would you like me to do, Mr Wilson?’ I’d ask.
He’d puff away on his pipe and say, ‘Just sit down and don’t bother me, Peter.’
So that’s what I did. I’d just sit there all day doing nothing, not bothering Mr Wilson.
It was while I was at the Town Hall that I had a mind-blowing experience at the Lesser Free Trade Hall – although it’s probably not the one you’re thinking of. It was the night of the Christmas party and my workmates had been winding me up about it all week because it was my first office do. Telling me all the horror stories about what so-and-so had got up to last year. I was sixteen. After work they took me and a couple of the other office juniors to the pub, forcing pints of mild down us until my head was spinning. I remember arriving at the Lesser Free Trade Hall for our big Christmas buffet, making it down the steps and into a corner of the room, but that’s as far as it got because I was so pissed by then that I collapsed. How long I lay there I don’t know. The next thing I knew, my workmates were carrying me out, holding me aloft like some kind of Viking burial, but only as far as the stairs for some reason. There they dumped me and I just lay upside down on the stone steps, puking, the stairwell revolving slowly around me. Then gradually I became aware of feet around my head and someone saying, ‘Who’s this?’ When I focused I could see it was the Lord Mayor.
‘Oh, that’s Peter Hook from the conveyancing department,’ said the town clerk, and then he helped the Mayor and his wife step over me, carefully avoiding my puddle of sick, so they could go and have their Christmas meal. Later two of my workmates helped me home.
‘Where do you live, son?’ one asked.
‘Just around the corner,’ I mumbled back, and the poor sods ended up carrying me all the way back to our house in Ordsall, an hour away, me telling them, ‘Just around the corner . . .’ the whole way home.
‘Where is it, son? Fucking hell.’
‘Just around the corner . . .’ They propped me against my front door, knocked then ran away so I fell in when the door opened. My mam went mad.
So that was my first experience of the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Amazingly, I kept my job: went right on back to spending my days not bothering Mr Wilson.
At nights I used to hang around with Bernard. Both of us had scooters but Barney got his first; they’d changed the licence age from sixteen to seventeen and he lied about his age to get his. My birthday being in February meant I had to wait a year. We were both gradually getting into music: starting with soul and reggae, moving into pop. Barney’s scooter was adorned with stick-on letters spelling ‘Santana’, his favourite group, and I had ‘Abraxas’ on mine, the name of their second album, and we used to ride around Langworthy Road on our Santana-themed scooters, looking for girls to chat up.
So there I was: working by day, pissing around and going out at night. Brilliant. Couldn’t last, though; those O Levels I told them I was going to pass came back to haunt me. Ironically I was doing my job really well and I’d been put in for a raise, but the raise meant I got noticed by the personnel department, who realized I hadn’t passed my exams. I tried to re-take them at night after work, with no success; I’d basically come up with a great scam where I got paid for sitting exams I never turned up for. So they asked me to leave. No hurry, they said, but I knew I was going to have to go sooner or later. Typically, I was too busy enjoying myself messing about with the lads to bother about exams, and in the end it was David Essex who showed me the way out.
Fucking David Essex.
‘Barney would always eat on his own or in the bath’
I’d gone to see That’ll Be the Day, starring David Essex and Ringo Starr, at the Carlton in Salford with Danny McQueeney, Deano, Greg Wood and Gordon Benbow, all mates from school. The film was great. If you haven’t seen it, David Essex plays this likely lad who works on the fairs, works at Butlin’s, shags around, has a right laugh then goes off to be a rock star. Now you’ve got to understand that, at that age, what I wanted was to shag around and be a rock star, and probably in that order if I’m honest, so that was it for me: I wanted that life. So I persuaded my mates that they wanted it, too – that we should all give up our jobs to g
o and work at Butlin’s.
The whole lot of us applied. They used to hold open interviews at the Midland Hotel in Manchester; you’d just phone up, go along and smile.
‘Have you got a criminal record?’ they asked.
‘No,’ I said, nose growing.
‘Right, okay. What do you want to do at Butlin’s? Do you want to be a Redcoat?’
I didn’t want to be a Redcoat. I’m quite shy, believe it or not, so I opted to work in the kitchens. Next they asked which Butlin’s I wanted to work at. Beforehand we’d all decided to say Pwllheli, and if not that then Blackpool.
As it turned out I didn’t get either of those. None of us did. We got Clacton-on-Sea.
But it didn’t matter. And, even though none of us knew where it was, and never thought to look, we were so excited about getting the job and pleased that all five of us were together that we thought, ‘Great!’; we quit our jobs, didn’t tell our parents till the Sunday before, and then Monday were on the coach to Clacton.
Where it was nothing like That’ll Be the Day. Where it was a nightmare from start to finish.
For a start it was scruffy and run-down – the bit where the staff lived was, at least – and there were only two chalets between the five of us, so one of us had to sleep on the floor. Then there were the other staff, who were the biggest bunch of bastards I’ve ever come across. We soon realized they were all in gangs. There was a Cockney gang and a Geordie gang, who of course hated each other’s guts and were always fighting. At night it was like the Wild West. Then you’d wake up in the morning and there’d be not only trails of blood everywhere but also all these guys kicking out last night’s conquests, these poor young girls they’d managed to lure back to their chalets; daughters of the punters – sometimes the wives.
In the kitchen I was with the biggest bunch of tossers you can imagine. I turned up to find I was working for this Scottish guy who stank of booze all the time. First thing he had me doing was scrubbing a set of steps that were caked in filth. The next thing he said was to get on the food line and dole out celery hearts for the punters’ lunch.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘I’ll just go and wash my hands . . .’
He spat. ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid. Don’t answer me back and get on the fucking line.’
Meanwhile the Cockney bastards who worked there came up with a couple of great games. For instance, if you left your light on, they’d put a dustbin through your chalet window. (They couldn’t rob you if the light was on, you see: didn’t know if you were in or not.) They’d pour hot fat on the floor in front of the huge rotating ovens, too; then they’d make me take out the roasted chickens, hundreds of them, and place bets on me going arse over tit. Also, when we were working the food line, they’d take turns throwing tomatoes at the back of our heads. All the time I’d be thinking, ‘What the fuck has gone wrong here?’ This was supposed to be my escape from the nine-to-five, my That’ll Be the Day life. I was missing Mr Wilson. The drudge was better than this. Anything was better than this.
On our third night in the camp, Thursday, we were getting ourselves dressed up to go out in the hope of copping off like David fucking Essex, when a guy from a chalet nearby said to me, ‘Is that a leather jacket, mate? Fucking hell, you’re not going to have that for two minutes. Someone’ll chin you and take it off you. Hide it now!’
Off it came and we slunk away to the Western bar. All five of us were having the same miserable experience so we sat swapping horror stories about the work and generally bemoaning our lot when this huge fight broke out. It was the kitchen Cockneys against the Geordies. God knows what started it but it completely went off, this huge punch-up in the middle of the bar, punters running for cover, everyone screaming and finally these Cockney guys picking up one of the Geordies and heaving him straight through the bar’s plate-glass window. They just left him hanging through the broken window, half in, half out, and sat themselves down and carried on drinking.
We were out of there, scuttling back to our chalets. We sat together in one of them for security, shaking like shitting dogs and going, ‘We’ve got to get out of here – we’ve got to get out.’
Then we heard a commotion from outside: two Cockneys, pissed. By now it was about two o’clock in the morning and next thing you know it was all going off again. A couple of Geordies ambushed them right outside our chalet, and for a while they were absolutely kicking the shit out of these two Cockneys. But then all the rest of the Cockneys came round the corner, caught the two Geordies and started kicking the shit out of them. At one point they had hold of this Geordie and were slamming his head on the wall of our chalet; meanwhile we were all inside, teeth chattering like Shaggy and Scooby Doo, still going, ‘Oh God, we’ve got to get out of here.’ We were only seventeen, remember.
In the end we all just slept where we were. When we got up the next morning there was blood everywhere outside our chalets and that was it: we decided there and then that we’d had enough and went and quit.
At the same time, 500 punters checked out because of the fight, and the police arrived to try to find out who had thrown the Geordie through the window of the Western bar – poor bloke was in intensive care. Co-operating fully with the investigation, we told the cops that we hadn’t seen a thing and were tucked up in our beds. All we wanted to do was work our week in hand and get the fuck out of Dodge – and when eventually we did, let me tell you, I have never been so happy to get on a coach in my life.
On return to Manchester a job in sewage would have been preferable to Butlin’s but, thanks to Danny McQueeney, I got a brilliant job doing shift work at the Co-Op Tea Warehouse on Ordsall Lane. Where my duties included sitting on my arse and occasionally falling asleep in a lovely warm, wonderful-smelling tea warehouse. Every time I sniff a teabag I’m right back there. It was well-paid, too. I was there for six weeks and was minted, absolutely minted, until my mum said to me, ‘You can’t work in the Co-Op Tea Warehouse, our Peter, it’s beneath you.’
I didn’t bother arguing. She already worked for the Manchester Ship Canal Company, in King Street, and I think she persuaded them to interview me for a job at their Chester Road conveyancing office. I got the job, just near where the Haçienda ended up years later. My first day there my new boss, Peter Brierley, said to me, ‘You’re lucky, you are: this desk that you’re getting, that used to be George Best’s desk.’ Apparently he’d worked there before he went full-time at United, as part of his apprenticeship.
Actually, I’ve got a George Best story for you. This occurred much later, when I was married to Caroline Aherne, who played Mrs Merton on telly. Me and her is a whole other story and we’re not going into it here – or anywhere, come to think of it (well, maybe in the New Order book) – but the point is we took a holiday to Spain, and were out one evening at a bar, and in the bar opposite was George Best with a load of blokes and a girl, who was very, very, drunk. She was lolling around all over the place, out of her tiny head, and the guys with George were taking turns feeling her up.
Watching this, me and Mrs Merton really got the hump. So Mrs Merton said to me, ‘You know him, go over and stop them.’
Now New Order had done the theme tune for the TV programme that Tony Wilson had presented about George Best and Rodney Marsh. He’d told us that Granada had no money for a theme tune and asked if we’d do it for free, which we duly did. That’s all it was.
I said, ‘Well, I don’t know him, do I? We did the theme for the programme, but I don’t know him.’
‘Well go over and say hello to him anyway. That’ll make him ashamed and he’ll stop.’
To be honest they’d settled down a bit by then but Mrs Merton was still mithering on at me, so in the end we both went over and I said, ‘Hello, George.’
He turned round, so drunk he was swaying on his feet and trying to focus, and he slurred, ‘Yeah?’
I said, ‘My name’s Peter Hook from New Order. We did the theme music to Best & Marsh – you know, the programme on Granada.
’
And he went, ‘Yeah, I know,’ and turned away and blanked me. It was so embarrassing. I just looked and felt like a complete twat. Then Mrs Merton started mouthing off and I had to drag her away. In the meantime they started messing about with this girl again. So in the end we rescued her, pulled her away, and these kids who were with George Best started getting a bit uppity: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
I was like, ‘Fuck off, mate. She’s pissed; she needs to go home. She shouldn’t be here.’
George Best was completely oblivious to all this. Never meet your heroes.
So anyway, it’s a small world. I got George Best’s job at the Manchester Ship Canal Company, then later I joined a band and ended up wanting to chin him. But back then I was pleased as punch to have got his job.
I was still living in Ordsall and could walk to work. They soon moved the department to the Dock Office on Trafford Road, which was even nearer, so for about a year everything was great. Like I’ve already said, though, the council was redeveloping and they started to knock down all the houses in Ordsall, wanting to move everyone out to a new development called Ellor Street, near the Precinct in Salford.
All my friends moved to Ellor Street, which was all high-rise seventies flats and a new shopping precinct all built out of concrete. It was fucking rotten, horrible, like a concrete wasteland. And this was when it first opened.
So, my mother, God rest her soul, wouldn’t move there. Me and our kid were gutted because all of our mates had moved but she wouldn’t budge, not even when the bulldozers moved in and we were the pretty much the last house standing in Ordsall – just ours and an empty one either side to prop it up. They kept offering her places in Ellor Street to try to get rid of us, but she wouldn’t go into a flat. She wouldn’t have it. All the flats they showed her she said were shitholes. The whole of Ellor Street she said was a shithole. Mind you, she was right: it was a shithole. But all my mates lived in that shithole and I wanted to live there too. I remember persuading her to at least have a look at one flat; we drove to see it but on the wall at the entrance to the flats there was sprayed the legend ‘Glasgow Rangers will die tonite!’ I don’t know if it was the bad spelling that most offended her but she made Bill turn straight round and she never went back.
