by Peter Hook
We lived like that for about six months, on our own like the weird family in a surreal film. The buses had stopped running – there was no traffic at all. To get anywhere we had to walk across a wasteland that had once been full of houses. Until at last my mum got an offer to relocate to another overspill area, Little Hulton. They’d offered her a three-bedroomed house in Brookhurst Lane with its own gardens, front and back, and an inside toilet. Didn’t have heating, mind, but otherwise it was fantastic and she took it on the spot.
So we moved to Little Hulton, and all my mates were in Salford. Twenty miles, which seemed a long way at seventeen with no car. Nightmare. This was when I started spending a lot of time at Barney’s, because getting back to Little Hulton was so difficult. Most weekends I’d get the bus to his in Broughton on a Friday after work. Then we’d hang around in Pips or Man Alive in town, getting pissed and trying to chat up girls even though we were useless. We’d sober up all Saturday and go out again that night, to Tiffany’s, Rotters or Rowntrees Sound, again in town, getting pissed and trying to chat up girls, back to his house again, me sleeping on the floor. We’d laze around all Sunday morning, fuck around in the afternoon, and then I’d get the last bus home.
It’s not for me to talk about Barney’s situation, but let’s just say that for one reason or another it wasn’t your average home life. He was quite indulged by his mum and dad. They didn’t exactly have pots of money but anything he wanted, he got – or seemed to: scooter, clothes, later an electric guitar, amp, etc.
The only room in the house that had any character was his. With his posters on the wall and his stuff lying around it looked like a proper lived-in room, whereas the rest of the house was strangely neat and tidy. No newspapers hanging around, the telly never on – no, well, life to it, really – and Barney would always eat on his own or in the bath. He was forever eating then falling asleep in the bath and waking up to find bits of his dinner floating around him. ‘I fucking fell asleep again,’ he’d moan. ‘Fucking dinner ended up in the bath.’ We would also spend a lot of time across the canal at his gran and granddad’s, the Sumners; they were lovely and waited on him hand and foot.
I was twenty, then, in early 1976, not long before the Sex Pistols came to Manchester for the first time.
‘Oh, fuck, it’s Steve Harley’
I’d started getting interested in pop music around twelve or thirteen, when, like every other kid back in those days, I was glued to Top of the Pops every week. Then somebody gave me a reel-to-reel tape recorder that already had a load of music on it, and I used to listen to that over and over again – stuff like ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’. Still, though, nothing could eclipse Top of the Pops, which I lived for. You forget now, what with MTV, YouTube, and the fact that music’s shovelled into your ears in every shop, restaurant and supermarket, but back then Top of the Pops was the only way you could get to see pop music being performed. For a kid from Salford it was mind-blowing to see Deep Purple doing ‘Black Night’, Sabbath ripping through ‘Paranoid’, Family doing ‘The Weavers Answer’, Marc Bolan, Bowie... Like having a window on a wonderful other world, even if they were miming. And it annoyed your parents.
As I got older I became a skinhead and from that discovered reggae: the Upsetters, the Pioneers, Desmond Dekker, Dave & Ansel Collins. It wasn’t until the fourth year that I got my first record player, though, when I bought one from Martin Gresty, who needed some quick cash. I don’t think his mum even knew he was selling her Dansette, to be honest, but I gave him eleven quid for it, which was all the money I had and a fortune in those days. Of course that meant I couldn’t afford to buy any records, which my mother thought was hilarious. So I nicked some. There was a shop on Langworthy Road that used to have old ex-jukebox singles for sale in a box outside and I swiped a couple sight unseen, just to have something to play on my Dansette. When I got round the corner to take a look at my haul I wasn’t exactly overjoyed: ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town’ by Kenny Rogers and ‘The Green Manalishi’ by Fleetwood Mac. I’d never heard of either. Still, at least I finally had something to listen to. Or so I thought. Turned out I couldn’t play them – being ex-jukebox they had no middles – and it took me another week to steal one! Years later I appeared on that BBC programme The One Show, talking about the first record I ever bought: I told them it was ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town’; I didn’t tell them that I’d nicked it, though.
But when I really got into music – when the bug didn’t so much bite as take a huge fuck-off chunk out of my leg – was on holiday in Rhyl. This was just before I left the Town Hall for Butlin’s: 1973, it would have been. There was me, Deano, Stuart Houghton, Danny Lee and Greg Wood, I think, five of us in a four-berth caravan. Christ it was freezing, and there was no electricity – there were gas mantles for lights – but it was the first proper holiday I’d ever had, and we spent it roaming the streets of Rhyl and listening to Radio Luxembourg in the caravan. They kept playing a song called ‘Sebastian’ by Cockney Rebel. That was it for me. For the first time, I listened to a record and really thought, Wow. Why, I don’t know. Because it was different, I suppose; it seemed so different. It had a slow orchestral start and built to a climax – it was very long, too, which was something unheard of for a pop record back then. It just grabbed me – grabbed my attention and held it. Strange how we would emulate it with ‘Blue Monday’ years later.
When I got back off holiday I bought the single. It was nine minutes long and you had to turn the record over halfway through, which just sort of added to the experience: it was part of the ritual of playing it, gave the song a dramatic pause and made me like the record even more. After that I became a fan of Cockney Rebel and bought their first LP, The Human Menagerie – a great record. They became my gateway to music. Before this when I’d watched Top of the Pops I’d just goggled at it, but now it was like I was part of it; I understood it. Bowie, Roxy, Ian Dury – I started to get them now.
Years later I was at an awards ceremony with New Order getting an award for ‘Blue Monday’. I’d given up drinking by then, so I was straight as an arrow when Steve Harley strolled up to me, and I thought, Oh, fuck, it’s Steve Harley out of Cockney Rebel.
He went, ‘Hello, Peter, how are you?’
And I thought, Not only is it Steve Harley, but he knows who I am and he’s dead fucking nice.
He went, ‘Oh, it’s so lovely to meet you. I believe that our first record was one of your inspirations?’
I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, it was,’ and ran away. Just couldn’t deal with it. Left him standing there looking around and no doubt thinking, That was fucking bizarre. But it wasn’t as bizarre for him as it was for me. ‘Sebastian’ had got me into the whole thing. If it hadn’t been for Steve Harley I wouldn’t have been standing at that awards ceremony talking to Steve Harley. Very, very weird, that was.
After that – Rhyl, I mean, not the awards – I started reading NME and Sounds. Then we began going to gigs. Saw Led Zeppelin, Cockney Rebel, of course, and half of Deep Purple’s set before Barney made us leave because he had a toothache. It wasn’t just him who had to leave: it was all of us. He’s always got away with fucking murder, that one.
I first read about the Sex Pistols in April 1976, on another holiday. Me, Stuart Houghton, Danny Lee and Danny McQueeney decided to go to Torquay and Newquay in my new car, a Mark Ten Jag 420G, registration KFR 666F (funny how I can remember all the numbers) – the same model the Krays had – that I’d bought for £325. We weren’t staying anywhere, just sleeping in the car. Needless to say it was tough, but enjoyable; we got on well – it was one of those holidays I’ll never forget. The tyres were knackered and we couldn’t go more than fifty miles an hour – took us hours and hours to get there. But one thing I do remember was sitting in a car park in Newquay at about seven in the morning, still pissed from the night before, reading Melody Maker. It had the Sex Pistols in it, and there was a picture of them taken at their gig at the Nashville Rooms where a huge
fight had broken out. Sitting there in the car park in Cornwall, with the sun coming up and all my mates snoring in the Jag, I had . . . Well, I suppose you could say I had another David Essex moment, an epiphany.
First off I was intrigued by the idea of a group who seemed, I don’t know, human compared to bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, who seemed, to a working-class tosser from Salford, so out of my league they might as well have lived on another planet. I mean, I’d never have looked at Led Zep and thought, I’m going to be the next John Paul Jones. He was like some kind of god up there. I loved the music. I loved watching it. But the idea of emulating them was ludicrous.
The Sex Pistols, though: they looked like working-class tossers too, which automatically made them completely different to anything I’d seen in music before. I was a great fan of James Dean; I’d seen Giant and Rebel Without a Cause. And now I felt a connection between him, these punks and me. That real snotty, rebellious, arrogant-kid type of thing, only not in glossy-looking 1950s America but in grey old 1970s Britain. The Pistols were the link somehow. And the fact that they had a reputation for fighting at every gig and were part of this movement – this punk movement . . .
I was like, I have got to see this lot.
TIMELINE ONE:
MAY 1948–APRIL 1976
31 May 1948
Martin Hannett born, Miles Platting, Manchester.
From an early age Hannett showed an aptitude for mathematics and science, interests he would carry through to his musical theory. Gaining a chemistry degree from Manchester’s UMIST, he played bass for Greasy Bear before forming the Invisible Girls, the backing band for John Cooper Clarke and, in later years, Pauline Murray and Nico. Together with Tosh Ryan he helped set up the musician’s collective Music Force, then Rabid Records, the home of Slaughter & the Dogs. Styling himself Martin Zero, he went on to produce the Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP, the first release on the independent New Hormones label run by the Buzzcocks’ manager Richard Boon. He produced Slaughter & the Dogs’ debut single, ‘Cranked Up Really High’, then worked with Chris Sievey (later known as Frank Sidebottom) and his band the Freshies, before scoring a Top Three hit producing Graham Fellows’ ‘Jilted John’ in July 1978. (Indeed, Hannett can be seen playing bass on a Top of the Pops performance of that song.) Shortly afterwards he produced Joy Division for the first time.
26 April (he asked me not to put the year in)
Alan Erasmus born, Didsbury.
Erasmus and Tony Wilson became friendly when they met at a Christmas party and bonded over a spliff. For a while Erasmus managed Fast Breeder but parted company with them and instead sought out Wilson, the two joining forces to put together a new band, the Durutti Column. The flat Erasmus shared with best friend Charles Sturridge (a Granada director who went on to make Brideshead Revisited) was at 86a Palatine Road, and doubled up as the Factory HQ.
20 February 1950
Tony Wilson born, Salford.
Wilson attended the De La Salle Grammar School in Salford, developing a love of drama and literature thanks to a performance of Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon. At seventeen he worked as an English and drama teacher at the Blue Coat School in Oldham; he then attended Cambridge, graduating with an English degree in 1971. After working for ITN as a trainee reporter he returned to Manchester in 1973, joining Granada and presenting Granada Reports as well as the music programme So It Goes. However, the end of So It Goes left Wilson pondering ways in which he could continue and extend his involvement in the music business . . .
15 January 1953
Rob Gretton born; raised Newall Green, Wythenshawe.
A fierce Manchester City fan, Gretton worked as an insurance clerk before leaving the job to work on a kibbutz with girlfriend Lesley Gilbert. He returned to the UK in 1976 and became involved in the emerging Manchester punk scene, working with Slaughter & the Dogs then the Panik.
9 October 1955
Peter Saville born; raised Hale, Manchester.
Saville attended St Ambrose College before studying graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic. Envious of contemporaries Linder Sterling and Malcolm Garrett, who had already made their names designing for the Buzzcocks and Magazine, and learning of the soon-to-open Factory club, Saville approached Tony Wilson at a Patti Smith concert. Not long afterwards the pair met in the canteen at Granada, where Saville showed Wilson a book of Jan Tschichold typography . . .
4 January 1956
Bernard Sumner born; raised Lower Broughton, Salford.
Sumner attended the Salford Grammar School, where he met Peter Hook.
13 February 1956
Peter Hook born.
15 July 1956
Ian Curtis born, Stretford, Manchester.
Early academic prowess saw Curtis admitted to the King’s School, Macclesfield; while there he met Deborah (Debbie) Woodruff. He was also friendly with Helen Atkinson Wood, who later found fame playing Mrs Miggins in Blackadder, and gave her his copy of The Man Who Sold the World. He passed seven O Levels but dropped out of school midway through studying for his A Levels to begin a job at Rare Records in Manchester. He became engaged to Debbie on 17 April 1974. After a spell running a record stall, he took jobs in the civil service, eventually settling in Oldham after his marriage in 1975. Still dreaming of a career in the music business, Ian placed an advert in the music press, signing himself ‘Rusty’, which attracted the services of guitarist Iain Gray.
13 December 1956
Deborah Woodruff born, Liverpool.
Having left Liverpool when she was three, Deborah’s parents set up home in Macclesfield, where she attended Macclesfield High School for Girls, a ‘sister’ school to the King’s School. She became acquainted with Ian in 1972 when she was seeing his friend Tony Nuttall. When she and Tony split, she agreed to go on a date with Ian, to see David Bowie at the Hardrock Concert Theatre in Manchester. Soon they were a couple. Deborah was Ian’s second serious girlfriend.
12 October 1957
Annik Honoré born, southern Belgium.
To satisfy a voracious musical appetite, Annik travelled to gigs throughout Europe, seeing Siouxsie & the Banshees more than 100 times, as well as Patti Smith, the Clash, Generation X, Iggy Pop and David Bowie. Like Ian Curtis, her favourite album was Bowie’s Low. Annik became involved with the fanzine En Attendant, and then made plans to move to London. In the meantime she saw Joy Division for the first time at the Nashville Rooms on 13 August 1979, having travelled from Belgium especially to see them, and two weeks later interviewed the entire band at the Walthamstow flat Dave Pils shared with his girlfriend, Jasmine. By September that year Annik was living in London, in Parsons Green, and working at the Belgian Embassy.
28 October 1957
Stephen Morris born, Macclesfield.
Morris attended the King’s School, Macclesfield but was expelled for drinking cough syrup. Morris had drummed with the Sunshine Valley Dance Band, a group of school friends, and worked for his father’s firm, G Clifford Morris, a local plumbers’ merchants. He spotted two adverts in the window of Jones’ Music Store in Macclesfield: ‘Drummer wanted for punk band the Fall’ and ‘Drummer wanted for local punk band Warsaw’. Luckily for him he responded to the advert with the local phone number.
23 August 1975
Ian Curtis and Debbie Woodruff marry, Henbury.
23 April 1976
The Sex Pistols play the Nashville Rooms, London.
It was by all accounts an unremarkable concert until Vivienne Westwood decided to ‘liven things up’ by slapping a female audience member. The girl’s boyfriend rushed to help her, at which point Malcolm McLaren came to the aid of Vivienne, then the band to the aid of them both. All of which was captured in what were to become iconic images of the Pistols and reported in the Melody Maker and the NME (in a piece written by a pre-Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant), marking the beginning of the Pistols’ notoriety and the aura of violence that was to accompany them from then on.
PART TWO
; ‘Disorder’
‘Normal band, normal night, few people watching, clap-clap, very good’
Inspired by the Velvet Underground, friends Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley had formed a band, taking their name from a headline in Time Out that read: ‘Feeling a Buzz, Cocks?’ Having made a pilgrimage to see the Sex Pistols in High Wycombe, they resolved to stage the Pistols in Manchester – with themselves supporting. A gig was scheduled for 4 June 1976, at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall – although, as it turned out, the Buzzcocks were not ready to play and support was instead provided by rock band Solstice.
Very few attended. Fifty at most. Yet the concert has been immortalized in two films (24 Hour Party People and Control), is the subject of a book (I Swear I Was There: the Gig That Changed the World, by David Nolan) and is popularly believed to have been the wellspring for years of musical innovation that was to follow, not just in Manchester but globally: in punk, post-punk and ultimately dance-music culture.
Among those who were definitely at the gig were Peter Hook and Bernard Dickin, who went on to form Warsaw/Joy Division/New Order; Steven Morrissey, later of the Smiths; Mark E. Smith, later of the Fall; Mick Hucknall, later of Frantic Elevators then Simply Red; John the Postman; photographer Kevin Cummins; and writer Paul Morley. They and others went away inspired: bands were formed, fanzines published, wardrobes overhauled – and the word about the Pistols was spread, so that the next concert, on 20 July, also at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, was far better attended. Most of those at the first gig returned, along with Ian Curtis and producer Martin Hannett.
