by Peter Hook
The night of that third Pistols gig there was a really lively atmosphere, to say the least. You’ve got to bear in mind that this was 9 December 1976, a week or so after the Pistols had done their Today-programme interview, when they’d gone on teatime TV and told Bill Grundy he was a ‘fucking rotter’. Next day it was all over the papers – ‘The Filth and the Fury!’ – and suddenly the Pistols were public enemy number one. They were about to go on their Anarchy tour with the Damned (who ended up getting thrown off it, for some reason), the Clash and Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, and because of the outcry most of the gigs were cancelled. Seventeen of the twenty-four dates were stopped by local councils. Among those that went ahead were two at the Electric Circus, and consequently a lot more people came along. The place was fucking rammed.
Even so, we recognized Ian. He stood out. Me and Barney were at the top of some stairs looking down and he came up the stairs with his donkey jacket on and we got talking to him because we’d seen him around. What were our first words to him? Fucked if I can remember. ‘Didn’t I see you at the Squat?’ something like that. I’m not sure we even found out his name that night, to be honest. He was just a kid with ‘Hate’ on his coat, just a normal kid. Of course, we were all punks, so we must have looked pretty wild compared to everybody else but he looked normal compared to us. He was nice. Softly spoken. Sharp sense of humour. Of the two portrayals of him on film, I prefer the one in 24 Hour Party People. The guy in Control, Sam Riley, played him as being much more arty and conventionally pretty than he was in real life, whereas Sean Harris in 24 Hour Party People had a bit more of the real-life Ian’s edginess and intensity. Neither were perfect and neither were totally off the mark, but for my money Harris was the more accurate.
It was at that same Pistols gig that we spoke to a guy from Sounds, who quoted us in his report of the gig – our very first national write-up.
The sentiments [that the Pistols were great] were echoed by most every kid I spoke to – they were certainly all in the process of forming bands. Stiff Kittens (Hooky, Terry, Wroey and Bernard, who has the final word) being the most grotesque offering.
Pete Silverton, Sounds, 18 December 1976
‘Grotesque’, eh? Cheers, mate. Wroey was someone Barney had met in Broughton, a friend of his cousin Grimmie. We were trying him out as singer at the time, which is why he got a mention in Sounds. Like most of our singers he didn’t last and we added him to a growing pile of rejects. The problem wasn’t that they were terrible as such, just that they were the wrong sort of terrible. I mean, we just needed someone to sound horrible and shit – we were a punk band after all – but they weren’t right for it. For some reason they couldn’t do proper singing or horrible and shit singing, just awful singing, but not in a good way. I suppose it’s one of those star-quality things. You recognize it when you see it.
Our search was taking too long. So we decided to advertise for a singer with a notice on the board in Virgin Records in Piccadilly, and in response got the biggest bunch of weirdoes you’ve ever met in your life. Barney went to meet a couple of them on his own, and we saw a few together, but none of them really stuck out. Getting a bit frustrated, we decided to ask Martin Gresty from school because he was the wackiest person we’d ever met in our lives. Fucking mental, he was, absolute psycho, but in a nice way, the terror of the school. We thought he’d be ideal as a punk singer. We went round to his house, just near Langworthy Road, and knocked on his door.
‘Is Martin there?’ we asked when his mother answered the door.
‘Sorry, love, he’s gone out plane-spotting.’
Turned out the scourge of Salford Grammar had calmed down. He was a plane-spotter now. Not trains but planes: he joined coach trips to different airports to spot planes. Very weird. (I mean, how hard can it be to spot a plane at an airport?) Anyway, we gave our numbers to his mum but Nidder (as we called him) never got in touch. Too busy spotting planes, probably. Which was a shame because I’m sure his lunatic tendencies would have been reawakened by being in the group. Plus he and Barney would have had mad fights. At school they used to wind each other up like crazy, and every Friday night they’d have a fight. We’d all go and watch them in the park but we’d be bored because they were so evenly matched – we’d be like, ‘Oh come on, lads, it’s five o’clock, we want to go home . . .’ Anyway, it wasn’t to be.
Then Danny Lee, my mate from Sorbus Close, tried out for the singer, but he wasn’t much cop. Then Wroey tried his hand but he wasn’t much cop either.
In the meantime we were becoming more and more friendly with Ian. We started seeing him out more often and we’d recognize him because he’d either be wearing his jacket with ‘Hate’ on it or his mackintosh, which he wore when he came straight from work. We’d found out his name, that he was from Oldham and married, which came as a bit of a shock – not that he was from Oldham, but that he was married. I mean, married. We’d only just left school. Or it felt like we had.
He’d got a band together as well. That was the thing about that period. We’d all been inspired. We were all desperate to get on and do it. Ian had returned from a punk festival in France, having seen Iggy and the Damned, all fired up about doing his own stuff. So far he’d managed to recruit a drummer and a guitarist and, like us, had been getting help (advice mainly) from Richard Boon and Pete Shelley.
We wanted a singer and a drummer but Ian had a drummer and a guitarist, so – remembering the rules of punk – we couldn’t join up, even though we desperately needed a singer and he desperately needed a bassist. We had to follow the rules.
We’d meet in the pub. ‘Hiya, mate. How are you? How’s it going? How’s the band?’
‘Oh, me drummer’s left.’
Ian’s drummer was Martin Jackson, a very good drummer. We ended up trying to get him for Warsaw but he said no and went to play for Magazine initially then ended up with Swing Out Sister, among others. I bet he still kicks himself now.
So anyway, he’d left Ian.
‘Still got me guitarist, though,’ said Ian. That was Iain Gray, a big mate of Ian’s and another familiar face on the punk scene. He’d been at the first Pistols gig.
There are two schools of thought on how Ian ended up joining us. The first is that Ian answered another advert we put in Virgin Records, but that’s not what I remember. (Saying that, there are a lot of things I don’t remember . . . ) The way I thought it happened was that the next time we saw Ian, at the last Sex Pistols gig at the Electric Circus, we said to him, ‘All right, mate. How’s it going? How’s the group? You still got Iain as your guitarist?’
‘Nah, he’s fucked off.’
And we had a Eureka moment. ‘Well, come in with us, then. You can sing for us.’
Either way, the result was the same: we had our lead singer. We met the Saturday after the gig and took him with us for a scramble round Ashworth Valley in Rochdale, getting him well and truly wet and covered in mud. A great way to audition singers; I highly recommend it.
But back to that fourth and last Pistols gig. It was a virtual riot, the kind of night you look back on and wonder how the fuck you escaped with your life. Like I said, the Damned were off the tour, so the Buzzcocks opened instead, followed by the Clash, Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, and then the Pistols, who’d been kicked out of not one but two Manchester hotels earlier that day. It was absolutely packed, inside and out, a riot outside and a riot inside. Loads of football fans had come looking for a fight and the Pistols played under a hail of gob and bottles, with constant fights taking place in front of the stage. Even in the queue outside you risked life and limb, with the kids on the flats raining bottles and bricks down from the roofs on to the punks below. They’d even gone to the trouble of taking the spikes out of the railings round the Electric Circus beforehand, to use as ammunition. After the gig it was bedlam outside, with the punks getting hammered left, right and centre. We flagged down a passing cop car and asked for help getting past these lunatics and the copper sa
id, ‘Run behind the van and we’ll escort you to your cars.’ We all trooped behind, but as he set off he put his foot right down and sped off – leaving us at the mercy of the mob. The bastard. Luckily Terry’s car was nearby so we dived in and scarpered.
Looking back I wonder if that last Pistols gig at the Electric Circus was the night that the allure of punk started to fade for some of us. Once you get football fans coming – the twats who just want to spit and throw bottles – it’s time to move on, and people like the Buzzcocks and then us, Magazine, the Fall and Cabaret Voltaire were eventually able to find a way forward. We’d already decided that the name the Stiff Kittens was too ‘cartoon punk’ and were looking for something else. Also, we’d started writing some songs. We still needed a drummer, though. Terry tried for that, too, but alas it wasn’t going to be him.
‘He was one of us’
Even though Terry was a bit shy and awkward in company, and all our school mates picked on him, we liked him all the same. Whereas my other mates preferred to stay in the pubs in Salford, Terry was into Bowie and Roxy and he introduced us both to the discos in town, Pips or Time & Place. Plus he was there right at the beginning. He was there for the Pistols, and he was in on the conversations about starting the group. He was one of us.
Like I say, I thought we’d given him a go as the singer and it didn’t work. He disputes that, but agrees that he then tried his hand at guitarist and that didn’t work. Then he became the drummer. By that time we’d recruited Steve, but Terry kept up with the lessons for himself. So he became the manager and he wasn’t very good at that, either. No killer instinct – he was too nice. Then he became the sound guy, and he was shit at being a sound guy, too, because Harry DeMac had taught him – as a joke, presumably – to turn things up with the ‘gain pots’ on the desk instead of the faders (ask your roadie), which resulted in some pretty wild mixes. (Saying that, if you listen to the tapes now they sound great. Quite a few have been released to much acclaim.)
After we found OZ PA, a local Manchester sound company, Terry became our roadie, eventually becoming New Order’s tour manager, and we had a great time. He was my oldest friend and my sounding post for the start of my moaning about Barney. We were always very close; Barney hated this and he took it out on Terry sometimes. I remember at the sound-check for one New Order gig, in the Midwest somewhere, some kid gave Terry four Es, saying, ‘Give them to the band, buddy!’
We shared them out, but Barney, who didn’t do sound-checks at that time so wasn’t even there, somehow found out and demanded Terry be sacked for it. I wouldn’t mind but American E is shit anyway; it wasn’t worth moaning about, especially with the amount we were earning then – something like a million dollars per gig with merchandizing – and we were carrying ounces of coke! Me and Rob told Barney to fuck off and he stormed out after the gig.
So anyway, by 1989 Barney had had enough of him. They hated each other. The Barney-and-Terry hate was even more intense than the me-and-Barney hate – and Barney threatened to leave New Order many times if Terry didn’t go. Eventually Terry moved to Los Angeles. With the advent of technology he reckoned he could work from anywhere so why not somewhere sunny? Thirteen years he’d worked with us by this point: through thick and thin, a loyal colleague and friend – still is, hopefully.
I mean, the trouble was that he started off as our lead singer and went right down the ladder, or up the ladder, all the way to the bottom or the top depending on how you think. It was actually Terry who discovered distortion for us. Ian had a small WEM amp and two columns of ten-inch speakers he used for his vocals. Terry didn’t have an amp that day so plugged in to the WEM while Ian wasn’t singing . . . Oh my God, it sounded like choirs of angels, distorted choirs of angels: heavenly. Barney elbowed him out of the way immediately, saying, ‘You and Ian use mine!’
Barney discovered distortion.
Still, things certainly improved and we started practising more regularly at night, often going straight from work. I was working at the Ship Canal; Ian was working at the Employment Exchange in Macclesfield and Barney was at Cosgrove Hall Films helping to make cartoons for ITV. His job was to colour them in, although he used to tell the girls he was a graphic artist. It was a cool place to work, actually, much more relaxed than the Town Hall. They let us practice there in the early days; it was one of the many places we used when we pinged around from place to place. It used to be very difficult to find rehearsal rooms. Every pub you’d go in you’d say, ‘We’re a band and we’re just looking for a rehearsal room.’
And they’d say, ‘Oh right. Why don’t you rehearse in the main room and you can play your songs and the punters will love it.’
Which sounded horrific to us. ‘Oh no, you wouldn’t like us . . .’
So we got a lot of offers but not many that were suitable, and we ended up shuttling around: the Albert pub in Macclesfield; Bernard’s gran’s front room; the Swan in Salford, which the landlady let us use for free if we bought a pie and a pint; disused mills and warehouses all over the place, where we used to go and drag gear up and down stairs then set up and play in the freezing cold. None of them were fully fledged rehearsal rooms apart from the Big Alex, where twelve bands practised at once and you couldn’t concentrate because it was like being in an engine room. You’d have a reggae band going on, a heavy-metal band sawing away. To try to compete, Ian had to go and buy himself the WEM PA system.
Up till then he’d just been hollering, which didn’t bother us because it sounded like the Sex Pistols, which is what we aspired to: that volume and attitude. Our first songs were like that, all just punk-copy songs. We had one called ‘BL’ – bleedin’ ‘ell – which was about Danny Lee’s sister Belinda, who I went out with and who broke my heart. I wrote it and Ian used to sing it, God bless him. I wrote ‘At a Later Date’ and ‘Novelty’, too – I was writing a lot of lyrics at work because I was bored. I could get rid of the whole month’s work in a week, so all I had to do for the other three weeks was go up and down the canal collecting the rent, piss about, fall asleep in the file room and write lyrics. Most of them were terrible but Ian was so nice and gracious like that he used to sing them anyway. Then we’d do one of his songs and it sounded so much better – and that was before we even knew what he was saying. What was obvious about Ian was that he was pouring everything into it; he wasn’t playing at being in a band. My lyrics were just words on a page whereas his were coming from somewhere else, his soul.
We were getting to know him a bit better, too. When we first met him he and Debbie lived in Oldham, but they sold up – either because she wanted to move back to Macclesfield or they just weren’t getting on in Oldham, whatever. But while they sorted out the house in Macc he lived at his gran’s in Stretford. Me and Barney would go round there to practise and usually go out to gigs and, as he was spending so much time with us . . . Well, I suppose you’d have to say we corrupted him a bit. Like, when we first met him he was a married man and behaved like one. If a fit girl walked by on the street, me and Barney would look but Ian wouldn’t give her a second glance. He was just that bit more of a gentleman than we were, I suppose you’d have to say. Well, a lot more of a gentleman.
But he didn’t stay that way for long. Soon enough he was behaving the same way: if a fit girl walked down the street, he’d be looking too. But that was his personality, though I’m not sure I realized this at the time. (Probably didn’t, if I’m honest.) But looking back that’s exactly what he was: a people pleaser; he could be whatever you wanted him to be. A poetic, sensitive, tortured soul, the Ian Curtis of the myth – he was definitely that. But he could also be one of the lads – he was one of the lads, as far as we were concerned. That was the people pleaser in him, the mirror. He adapted the way he behaved depending on who he was with. We all do a bit, of course, but with Ian the shift was quite dramatic. Nobody was better at moving between different groups of people than he was. But I also think this was an aspect of his personality that ended up being very dama
ging to him. He had three personas he was trying to juggle: he had his married-man persona, at home with the wife, the laddish side and the cerebral, literary side. By the end he was juggling home life and band life, and had two women on the go. There were just too many Ians to cope with.
I’ve realized all this in the years since, of course. At the time I just thought he was a great guy. And he was a great frontman. You could tell.
Now, if only we could find a drummer.
‘I can’t actually think of anything less “us”
than a wet-towel fight’
So we asked around for a drummer and when that drew a blank we tried advertising. Our first reply was from a student whose name I can’t remember. We took him on but he really got on our tits, so even though he was an okay drummer we decided to get rid of him. Being a right pair of shits, me and Barney decided that the only way to ditch him was by telling him he was ‘too good’ for us.
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.’
