Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook

  Still we played on. We were looking at each, like, ‘What the fuck? He seemed so nice . . .’ as Ian threw himself to the floor and began writhing around in the broken glass, cutting himself in the process. Any remaining audience members were either scared half to death or laughing at him, while we were just freaked out. This was our mate going mental here. In the end he returned to the stage and we finished the gig, watching as what was left of the crowd scarpered rather than risk another outburst. Nobody fancied being pelted with more broken glass or bits of broken table. It was one of our worst gigs ever.

  Looking back, I think there was a bit of showmanship involved. Ian was really into Iggy and was always pushing us in that direction musically. But I think this was a time that he took on the physicality of Iggy too, prompted partly by him being pissed and partly by this huge fall-out with Fast Breeder. Even so – even knowing where it was all coming from – it was a massive shock to see him like that. We’d witness other examples of it, of course, when he’d lose his temper – usually when he was pissed – and start screaming and shouting. But that was the first time.

  That was Steve Brotherdale’s first gig with us – what an initiation. His second was at Tiffany’s in Leicester, when he blotted his copybook with us all by coming to the front of the stage, bringing his high-hat with him, and then playing said high-hat. Ian just looked at him with his gob hanging open then told him to get the fuck back, which he did. But the writing was on the wall from that moment on.

  He was still with us for our very first recording session: the Warsaw demo, which we did at Pennine Sound Studios, a converted church on Ripponden Road in Oldham. We’d pooled what money we had to buy some recording time and in we went, green as you like. Paul the engineer walked us through the process: he’d mic it all up, sound-check and we’d record it all in one take, no overdubs. He listened back. ‘Great. There’s your master, lads.’ Five tracks – ‘Inside the Line’, ‘Gutz for Garters’, ‘At a Later Date’, ‘The Kill’ and ‘You’re No Good for Me’ – all done in three or four hours, which was all we could afford.

  ‘Inside the Line’ and ‘The Kill’ were Ian’s; ‘Gutz for Garters’, ‘At a Later Date’ and ‘You’re No Good for Me’ were mine. Listening back now you can hear what a punk band we were then. ‘You’re No Good for Me’ in particular was proper sub-Buzzcocks rubbish. Just about the only indication to our future sound was ‘The Kill’, which we later rerecorded during the Unknown Pleasures sessions, when it sounded very different indeed. Overall, the demos were the sound of a band still finding its feet, but ‘The Kill’ still showed that we were getting somewhere. More importantly, for the time being at least, we now had demo tapes we could use to try to get lots more gigs outside of Manchester.

  Terry, still our manager, had the job of copying the demos and sending them out to venues. The idea was that he’d ring the venue a bit later, find out what they thought of the tape and see if they’d give us a spot. ‘All right, it’s Terry Mason, manager of Warsaw – just wondered what you thought of the demo I sent you?’ That sort of thing.

  But every time he rang someone he was getting the same reaction.

  ‘Terrible.’

  ‘Absolutely shit, mate.’

  ‘Fuckin’ awful.’

  So Terry was saying to us, ‘No one wants you, lads. They all say you’re shit,’ which we couldn’t understand because other groups who were much shitter than us (like the Drones, for example) were getting gigs out of town. Us? Nothing.

  So I said to Terry, ‘Terry, give us one of them tapes and let me have a listen to it, and make sure it’s all right.’

  He went, ‘All right, Hooky, here y’go,’ and fished one of out his jacket, one of those tapes you get – or used to get – in a pack of three; TDK, something like that. I put it on in the car and it started off okay. Bit muffled, a little distant, but you could hear my bass, Barney sawing away, Steve Brotherdale doing the business, Ian doing his punky singing – yet to fully develop his baritone, of course; still doing the punky shouting back then but sounding great. We’re sounding like a band, a good band. The kind of band you’d want playing at your venue, surely . . .

  Then suddenly I heard the theme tune to Coronation Street drown it all out. And next I hear this voice, Terry’s mum, Eileen, saying, ‘Come on now, Terr y, your tea’s ready . . .’

  Now back then the only way you could record tape-to-tape was by using two little flat cassette players, put speaker-to-speaker, which was what Terry had been doing. But the dozy bugger had been recording them while he was watching telly and waiting for his mum to do his tea. No wonder no one wanted to book us.

  So Terry stopped being our manager and became our road manager, or head roadie or whatever, and we started doing the managing ourselves. We sent out new demo tapes, made some calls and sure enough we got some bookings – the first being for Eric’s in Liverpool. Result. Except our drummer upped and left.

  Rob Gretton was a high-profile member of the Manchester music scene. He’d missed the two Pistols concerts, having been on a kibbutz in Israel with long-term partner Lesley Gilbert, but on his return became involved with Slaughter & the Dogs and helped to finance their first single, ‘Cranked Up Really High’ (produced by Martin Hannett, then working as Martin Zero). Next he produced a fanzine, Manchester Rains, before setting up Rainy City Records, which released the one and only EP by the Panik, It Won’t Sell. He had also promoted Siouxsie & the Banshees at the Oaks in Chorlton.

  We didn’t yet know Rob, but he was already doing us a favour in a weird kind of way – because for some insane reason the Panik asked Steve Brotherdale to join them and off he went. They were a lot punkier than us, and he was a hard, fast drummer, so he suited them, plus he thought they had more potential than we did. He probably regrets leaving us – well, he must regret leaving us – but looking back I don’t think he would have lasted anyway. He was the right drummer for that phase of the band, but not for the sound we were moving towards.

  Anyway, off he went to join the Panik and I barely saw him after that. He stayed around, because after the Panik he joined a band called V2. After V2 faded away, well, I went in a McDonald’s about ten years ago, ordered a quarter pounder (no ketchup, no cheese) and medium fries, and the guy serving me went, ‘Hooky?’

  And I went, ‘Yeah?’

  He said, ‘Don’t you remember me? Steve Brotherdale.’

  There he was. Let that be a lesson to you.

  The next I heard of him was in 2009 in the Manchester Evening News, when he was banged up for stalking his ex-wife, sad to say.

  Anyway – we needed a new drummer. What a ball-ache.

  We placed more ads. Put one in Virgin Records in Piccadilly, where we used to buy our records, and Ian put one up in Jones Music Store in Macclesfield, which was where Steve saw it.

  Steve was Stephen Morris. He contacted the number on the advert and arranged an audition, which took place in a classroom at the Abraham Moss Centre in Cheetham Hill, a community centre we were using for rehearsals at the time.

  The first thing we noticed about him was that he was dressed like a geography teacher, right down to the patches on the elbows of his jacket. The second thing: that he was nervous as hell. Smoking. Shaking. Me and Barney were looking at each other, like, Oh my God, he’s a shivering wreck.

  Still. After we’d shifted tables, we set up our gear and cranked up. You know exactly what I’m going to say now: he was mega, an absolute revelation. He had all that power that we were looking for but with a texture we hadn’t heard before. Most drummers just hammer it out. Steve was playing the drums. You could tell he’d been playing with a jazz trio, because it was as though he’d somehow combined the feel and intricacy of jazz with the power and energy of rock and punk. We were over the moon. At last, we had a drummer: a drummer straight from the drummer genie who was not only brilliant but also had his own kit and his own car. Steve worked for his dad’s plumbing firm, G Clifford Morris in Macclesfield, so he was on a good
wage, and the car came with the job. He seemed a nice bloke, too, very witty and dry, and if it pissed him off that Barney’s mate Dr Silk called him Son of Forsyth because of his big chin – a nickname that stuck – well, he was gracious enough not to show it.

  On the other hand, he was very closed-off. Musically we were fine: we clicked and went on to become one of the best rhythm sections in music history. But on the personal side I never got to know him properly, not in all the years we worked together. I’m very direct and he’s not. I’m a working-class yobbo; he’s an English eccentric. I like change; he doesn’t.

  It’s quite funny really, because even at that early stage of the band we were all pretty distant from one another. Me and Barney – once best mates – had fallen out after a motorbiking holiday in the South of France we went on with Danny Lee and Stuart Houghton, when I’d ended up playing the middle man between the two sets of mates. That was bad enough, but the whole thing went tits-up when Stuart crashed his bike, spent all his money on medical bills and then, when his bike finally expired, needed cash to get home. Let’s just say that, when it came to helping out, Barney wasn’t very helpful: ‘It’s my holiday. Why should he spoil it?’

  After that I couldn’t really look at him the same way. When I got back I just hung out with Terry and Twinny – the roadies, in other words – because they were my mates. Twinny I’d met in the Flemish Weaver and got to know him over a beer. But then a couple of days later when I said hello at the bar he was really fucking rude, looked at me like I was off my head and told me to fuck off. I went back to my corner moaning about it to Greg Wood, like, ‘That fucking Twinny’s a weird one, isn’t he? I had a good crack with him the other night and he’d just told me to do one.’

  ‘Why do you think he’s called Twinny?’ said Greg. ‘That’s his twin, y’dickhead.’

  Ah . . .

  He ended up being our roadie – the ‘Karl’ Twinny did, while ‘Paul’ Twinny became a good friend once I got to know him – and mostly I hung around with him and Terry and Platty on the Precinct. Barney ended up becoming quite close to Ian – when he and Sue did eventually get married, in October 1978, they invited Ian and Debbie but not me and Iris, which goes to show how far we’d drifted apart by then – and Steve, well, he was Steve, an island of Steve. He was with his girlfriend Stephanie until he got together with Gillian, and then it was Steve and Gillian, ‘the other two’. That was pretty much how the alliances went for the rest of our careers together. I mean, I loved them as band-mates – I loved the group – thought they were great musicians and we really clicked as songwriters. But as people? As friends? Not really. We were individuals, me, Steve and Bernard. The glue that held us together, the driving force of the band, was Ian. Us three were concentrating on just our bits, with him holding it all together. That’s why we never really looked at his lyrics until after he’d died. It was because we were all just concentrating on doing our bit. Three little musical islands with Ian pulling us all together.

  The story of how New Order began is for another time, but it was hard to write songs without Ian because the spot we looked to for help was empty. Rob Gretton was our manager by then, so he became the glue that held us together – as people, at least – but when he died of a heart attack in 1999, well, that left nobody. And it’s been downhill ever since – until, at the time of writing, it’s as bad as it could possibly be.

  Joy Division and then New Order were ships that needed captains, but our captains kept on dying on us.

  ‘Apart from the odd pint pot in the gob it was a good gig’

  So our first gig with Steve was at Eric’s, Liverpool, supporting X-Ray Spex, which you’d have to say marked a new phase of the band: new drummer, getting out of Manchester more. I later found out that the audience was full of members of Liverpool bands: Jayne Casey from Big in Japan, Pete Wylie out of the Mighty Wah! Ian McCulloch from Echo & the Bunnymen and Julian Cope from the Teardrop Explodes. It was there that we met Roger Eagle, a real legend in the North West, who used to promote the Twisted Wheel club in Manchester and had gone on to run Eric’s. It was his idea to put us on twice, first in the late afternoon – a matinee show for kids, which we were delighted about because we really did love to play in those days – and then again in the evening. What’s more, Roger gave us a crate of Brown Ale, our first-ever rider. None of us liked Brown Ale, but still – the fact that we had a rider was fantastic.

  So it was great, the beginning of a brilliant relationship with Roger, who we really got on with, and with Eric’s, one of my favourite-ever venues.

  The next gig was Middlesbrough. Put on by someone else who would have a big effect later on in our career. Bob Last, who, along with his label Fast Records, would become a great supporter. Now back then, there was none of this, ‘Oh, bloody hell, not another gig.’ It was, ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ Of course, we weren’t used to playing outside Manchester so were all out of bed at the crack of dawn with excitement, me having to run off the adrenalin as usual, and us turning up about midday only to find the venue shut up and locked till five. Great.

  We waited around, got in and did the sound-check. Then later when the venue opened it began to fill up with skinheads, thousands of ‘em. Well, probably only thirty, but at the time it seemed like more, all milling around swilling beer. Then just before we went on the DJ put on an Adam & the Ants record, which had some kind of weird, mad amphetamine-like effect on them, like a bunch of six-year-olds drinking Coca-Cola at a birthday party. No kidding, they went berserk. It was if they wanted to get a full head of steam before the main event. Which was us, of course. As we came on and started playing, the skins surged to the front and immediately started slinging plastic pint pots at us. All of us apart from Steve were getting showered in plastic and beer (not much beer, mind – the pots were empty – but still) and I seemed to be getting the worse of it, with several bouncing off my head. One of these twats obviously had me right in his sights and I spent the whole night ducking. I was livid.

  It didn’t affect our playing, though. We were always the kind of band who performed best with the crowd against us. Apart from getting the odd plastic pint pot in the gob it was a good gig. Bob had been watching us play, and had seen this particular skinhead throwing pint pots at me all night, and afterwards he dragged him by the ear backstage. But the dressing room was L-shaped and I was at the bottom of the L, so he spoke to Bernard.

  ‘This is that bastard who was throwing pots at Hooky all night. I’ve brought him to apologize.’

  And Barney went, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s all right, let him go’ – without telling me; I was just sitting at the back oblivious to it all.

  Next thing I knew Ian came back and said, ‘Oh fucking hell, Hooky, that skin who was throwing pint pots at you all night – he’s just been dragged back by the promoter to apologize.’

  ‘Right, where is that twat? I’m going to rip his fucking head off.’ Full of the usual bravado.

  ‘Oh, Barney told him it was all right and to let him go,’ says Ian. I went mad. Stormed up the dressing room and went off at Barney: ‘You fucking what?’ Started having a massive row with him, which was probably our first ever argument, after all those years. Even during the holiday in the South of France we’d never really argued; whenever he’d pissed me off I just used to seethe and bottle it all up. But that night, because my blood was up, I let rip at him and it opened the floodgates because from then we were always arguing, worse than a married couple.

  In New Order he’d say, ‘If you ever hit me, it’s all over. You’ll never see me again.’ We never did come to blows. I sometimes wonder, though, if a good scrap might have been the answer, might have cleared the air.

  Manchester’s punk hub, the Electric Circus, no longer able to afford the big names and refused a food licence – and thus a late licence – by the council, was forced to shut in October. Among the bands performing on the final Saturday were Steel Pulse and the Drones. Warsaw opened the Sunday, while the Pref
ects, the Worst and the Fall all played, Howard Devoto debuted three songs from his new band, Magazine, and the Buzzcocks headlined, the night ending with a stage invasion and a ‘Louie Louie’ sing-along. Virgin Records sent a mobile studio to record the weekend for a ten-inch, Short Circuit: Live at the Electric Circus, which was eventually released in June 1978. It featured ‘At a Later Date’ by Warsaw (though credited to Joy Division, the band having changed their name by then), the performance beginning with Bernard Sumner calling out, ‘You all forgot Rudolf Hess.’

  I don’t know the reason for him saying that. One theory is that we’d just played ‘Warsaw’, which was a song about Rudolf Hess. Well, it wasn’t about Rudolf Hess as far as I know, but the lyrics quoted his prison number, 31G-350125, which Ian had used because Hess was in the news. A book had come out about him that Ian and Bernard had read, and there were people saying he should be let out because he’d served his time. It was very much a topical issue of the day. However, I don’t know if we’d even written the song at that point, never mind played it.

  Whatever the reason, Bernard must have been gearing himself up for it, and we got the shock of our lives when he did it because he didn’t even have a microphone; he went over to grab Ian’s mic to do it.

  We’d regret all that later, of course. Because all it did was give more ammo – if you’ll forgive the phrase – to those who said we were glorifying Nazis. But at the time we were just pleased to get on the record; whatever Barney said was nothing compared to that. We’d had a period of lying low a bit. There was the demo tape debacle, then Steve Brotherdale leaving, and Ian in particular was getting frustrated that we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Other bands – the Panik, the Nosebleeds, the Drones, Slaughter & the Dogs – seemed to be overtaking us, which wound him up no end because he felt we were much better than they were. All of which meant that we turned up for the last night of the Electric Circus absolutely determined to get on the bill.