by Peter Hook
Cuttings 1977–1983
“Tony Wilson was in the audience. I can never remember anything if I’m nervous, and I must have been shitting myself about that gig because I can’t remember a thing!”
31 May 1977
Warsaw play Rafters, Manchester, supporting the Heartbreakers. Admission: £1 at the door or 75p in advance from Fagins’ reception.
June 1977
Slaughter & the Dogs’ ‘Cranked Up Really High’ released on Rabid Records. Produced by Hannett and partly financed by Rob Gretton, who produced the Slaughter & the Dogs fanzine.
3 June 1977
Warsaw play the Squat, Manchester. Part of the Stuff the Jubilee festival; the bill also includes the Fall, the Drones, the Worst and the Negatives, plus a new-wave/punk disco. Warsaw are joined by John the Postman singing ‘Louie Louie’. Admission: 50p.
6 June 1977
Warsaw play the Guild Hall, Newcastle, supporting the Adverts, Penetration and Harry Hack & the Big G. Admission: 75p.
“This was the first appearance of Barney’s sleeping bag. Having piles was a feature of being in Joy Division. Ian got them from sitting on the heater at T. J. Davidson’s and both Twinny and I got them from the van during the European tour in 1980. Terry Mason’s would explode regularly. But you know what? As far as I know, Bernard never had piles, just a sore arse.”
16 June 1977
Warsaw play the Squat, Manchester, featuring last on the bill after Harpoon Gags, Bicycle Thieves and Split Beans. The event is billed as ‘Time’s Up’ (in homage to the Buzzcocks bootleg) and held in aid of the ‘Windscale Festival’, according to the flyers. Admission: 50p.
25 June 1977
Warsaw play the Squat, Manchester.
“This was Tony Tabac’s last gig. We’d been introduced to the Squat by Pete Shelley. He said, ‘Oh, there’s a place in Manchester where you can just turn up and play,’ which sounded great because it was really difficult to get gigs; the normal clubs just weren’t into punk gigs at all. At the Squat there would be more people from bands than there was audience. It was very dingy. There were no lights and it was freezing. Everyone who went there remembers it, though.”
30 June 1977
Warsaw play Rafters, Manchester.
“This was Steve Brotherdale’s first gig. A running-order squabblefest with Fast Breeder led to us meeting a pre-Factory Alan Erasmus for the first time, as well as speaking to Martin Hannett by telephone.”
July 1977
Warsaw enter ‘A Talent Contest’, the Stocks, Walkden.
“This was run by an agency from Bolton and the Stocks wasn’t far from where I lived. The idea was that you just turned up and played and if you were good the agency would sign you up.
Perfect, we thought. We can’t go wrong.
Things started to go wrong straight away, though, when the proper old-school compere asked us how we’d like to be introduced. Result: blank faces all round.
After struggling to get anything out of four inarticulate punks, he blurted out, ‘Do you like Deep Purple?’
And with that he left for his build-up to a coachload of old ladies from the Farnworth Flower Arranging Club, during which he said the immortal lines: ‘If you like Deep Purple you’ll love these lads! Put your hands together for Warsaw!’
We trudged on and played but were too loud: our volume kept tripping the DB meter on stage, which then cut the power to our amps. Chaos. The old ladies all had their hands over their ears. We struggled through for a couple of numbers until Ian stormed off in disgust. When we went back into the dressing room to commiserate, he was buzzing.
‘The female singer before us was changing when I came in,’ he said. ‘Saw her tits!’
With that we packed up and drove to the Ranch, where Foo Foo let us set up and play. Great gig; went down a storm. Those were the days. The Ranch was our regular haunt for ages, marred only by us getting chased by Teddy Boys occasionally. But it came to an abrupt end when the cloakroom gave Barney’s leather jacket away one night – he went ballistic and we were barred.”
18 July 1977
The Warsaw demo session, Pennine Sound Studios, Oldham. Tracks recorded: ‘Inside the Line’, ‘Gutz for Garters’, ‘At a Later Date’, ‘The Kill’ and ‘You’re No Good for Me’. These are the only recordings to feature Steve Brotherdale on drums.
20 July 1977
Warsaw play Tiffany’s, Leicester, supporting Slaughter & the Dogs.
16 August 1977
The Buzzcocks sign to United Artists on the bar of the Electric Circus. Elvis Presley dies.
27 August 1977
Warsaw play Eric’s, Liverpool, supporting X-Ray Spex. This is the band’s first gig with Steve Morris, comprising two slots at the legendary Liverpool venue: a matinee in the afternoon for children and then an evening show.
“Roger Eagle was a really nice guy. It struck you straight away, as soon as you met him, that he was different to other people. He was just a really nice bloke who loved music and looked after you.”
14 September 1977
Warsaw play the Rock Garden, Middlesbrough. Set list: ‘Reaction’, ‘Inside the Line’, ‘Leaders of Men’, ‘Novelty’, ‘At a Later Date’, ‘Tension’, ‘The Kill’, ‘Lost’.
“Bob Last, the promoter, came into the dressing room after the gig. ‘Anyone want a tape?’ he said.
No one but me replied, and this was the start of what was to become a collecting obsession. That tape he gave me is the only recording of us live as Warsaw and was the first time I’d ever been able to listen to the group. What a great revelation – we were really good. Warsaw ‘Live in Middlesboro’, it was called: I treasured that tape for thirty years until it was stolen and bootlegged very recently.”
24 September 1977
Warsaw play the Electric Circus, Manchester, supporting the Rezillos.
The Rezillos’ roadie/manager Bob Last was an early supporter of Warsaw but would eventually baulk at singing them to his influential Fast Product label – legend has it because of the Nazi associations then dogging the band.
2 October 1977
Warsaw play the Electric Circus, Manchester, on the second night of the club’s final weekend. The gig is recorded by Virgin for the Short Circuit album to be released the following year. The recording includes ‘At a Later Date’ and the release is later re-labelled ‘Featuring Joy Division’.
7 October 1977
Warsaw play Salford College of Technology, supporting Slaughter & the Dogs, the Drones, Fast Breeder and V2.
8 October 1977
Warsaw play Manchester Polytechnic, supporting Slaughter & the Dogs.
13 October 1977
Warsaw play Rafters, Manchester, supporting Yachts.
19 October 1977
Warsaw play Pipers, Manchester, with the Distractions, Snyde and Nervous Breakdown.
November 1977
The Panik’s It Won’t Sell EP released on Rob Gretton’s Rainy Days records – the only release for both band and label.
24 November 1977
Warsaw play Rafters, Manchester, supporting the Heat and Accelerator.
14 December 1977
The An Ideal for Living EP sessions, Pennine Sound Studios, Oldham. Tracks recorded: ‘Warsaw’, ‘No Love Lost’, ‘Leaders of Men’, ‘Failures (of the Modern Man)’.
“Not long ago I was DJing in Eden in Ibiza with this guy called Dave Booth from Garlands in Liverpool. On the flight home we got talking about places in Manchester and he mentioned that he DJed at Pips.
I went, ‘Pips? You’re joking! Me and Barney took our first record to Pips for the DJ to play.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That was me. I was the one who put it on – cleared the fucking floor, it did.’
Small world . . .”
31 December 1977
Warsaw play the Swingin’ Apple, Liverpool. This New Year’s Eve gig is the last the band perform using the name Warsaw.
PART THREE
‘Transm
ission’
‘It was like The X Factor for punks’
We played our first gig as Joy Division at Pips, as I’ve already said. After that . . . Nothing. Not for two long months.
It was my turn to manage the band. I was still working at the Ship Canal, and would phone up, say, Dougie James, who used to run Rafters on Oxford Street, hoping to get a support gig, desperate to get a gig. For us back then every minute without a gig felt like a week, like forever. So I was bugging the hell out of promoters, and especially Dougie, who was a nightmare to pin down.
I’d get him on the phone and he’d go, ‘I’ll speak to you later, mate. Come and see me. Bring me a tape.’ Just fobbing me off. Always some excuse for not hearing me out. Twice I bussed it into town to try and catch him and speak to him face-to-face. Couldn’t see him. On one occasion I went at dinnertime and had to walk back to work because I didn’t have the money for a bus both ways. But I did eventually get to see Dougie, when I followed him into his office and more or less cornered him.
‘All right, Dougie? I’m Peter Hook. We spoke on the phone. I was hoping to get a support gig for my band.’
He was sighing like he’d heard it all a thousand times before and, to be fair, he probably had. ‘We haven’t got any gigs. We’ve got no gigs. We’ve got loads of fucking supporting bands. We’re all full up.’ Blah, blah, blah. It’s quite funny, really, because naturally I’m a bit shy but when it came to the band I never was. I was so driven and so desperate for the group to do well that I was always dead pushy, like I was then in Dougie James’ office: ‘Well, what about that Siouxsie & the Banshees gig you’ve got coming up? It’s not even been advertised yet. You must need a support for that.’
He sighed again. ‘Oh. Let me have a look. Let me have a look,’ and he flicked through his book, pretending to look. ‘Oh sorry, mate,’ he said at last, ‘I can’t give you that one. Someone else is doing that.’
My face fell. ‘Who?’
‘Joy Division,’ he said. ‘Group called Joy Division are doing that; bad luck.’
I said, ‘That’s great because we’re Joy Division.’
You’ve never seen anyone back-pedal like it. ‘Oh no, no, no. I mean, I mean . . . someone else is doing that. Look, fuck it, fucking don’t bother me, all right. Get the fuck out.’ He threw me out. That was it. I walked back to work feeling very down and demoralized, which is a feeling you have to get used to when you’re managing a band, any band, but definitely ours at that time. We were hurting for gigs, and we needed a manager to help us get them.
The Stiff Test/Chiswick Challenge, a touring talent show set up by the two labels, came to Manchester Rafters on 14 April 1978. Local groups affected to scorn the enterprise for its London-centric air, but twelve or thirteen turned up to play anyway, hoping to impress the label heads. They included an impatient Joy Division as well as a ‘joke’ band, the Negatives, formed by journalist Paul Morley and photographer Kevin Cummins. Meanwhile, Ian Curtis barracked Tony Wilson for failing to feature Joy Division on So It Goes.
The Stiff/Chiswick night was like The X Factor. Except it was like The X Factor for punks, so a bit of a free-for-all and a very highly charged night indeed. The sight of our roadie, Platty, chasing Kevin Cummins out of Rafters, with him clutching his drum kit and screaming like a baby, is going to stay with me for the rest of my days – I hope.
It was Stiff we wanted to impress. They were the cool record label. They had Wreckless Eric and Kilburn & the High Roads – later to become Ian Dury & the Blockheads – and was run by a guy called Jake Riviera, a bit of a legend in the music business, who might sign you if he liked you. Needless to say we were dead keen to get on the bill but the competition was fierce. Like the last night of the Electric Circus, everybody turned up and everybody wanted to play.
Having already been shafted by Fast Breeder, we knew that if we went on too late all the punters would have buggered off, so we were desperately trying to get on as early as we could. Trouble was, so were all the other bands. It was already dog-eat-dog, with everybody thinking that this could be their big chance and arguing about who was going to go on, when Morley turned up with Kevin Cummins and some others in tow, taking the piss with their made-up punk group. They thought it was going to be dead funny to audition as a band who couldn’t play. What a hoot. Maybe it would have been funny – I mean, let’s not get all no-sense-of-humour about it – maybe we would have seen the funny side if we hadn’t been a group who could play, were deadly serious about what we were doing, desperate to get a gig and a contract. We weren’t writers or photographers larking about to make some obscure arty point that nobody understood anyway. This was serious for us. Life or death.
Morley started by telling us that they were going on first. And we were saying, ‘Oh, fuck off, you’re not fucking pissing about and pissing off the judges before we come on; you can fuck off.’
‘No, we’re fucking going on.’
‘Fuck off are you.’
Ian was livid. One thing I remember about that night is that Ian was pissed and angry the whole night. Which was why he’d gone up and had a go at Tony Wilson, of course. I wasn’t there for any of that, but I know in Debbie’s book she says he first wrote Tony a note calling him a twat and all sorts, then went up to him to have a go at him for not putting us on TV. Tony was apparently pretty good about it, but I don’t think he knew much about us at that point. He said on the Joy Division film that we were next on his list, but I’m not so sure about that. I don’t think we were really on his radar then – not until that night, in fact.
Anyway. Our argument with the Negatives escalated. I was threatening Paul Morley, Ian was threatening Paul Morley, Barney was under a piano and Steve was hiding in the corner, and we finished by basically chasing the Negatives out, so they ended up not playing while we went on last, at about twenty past two in the morning, played about four or five songs and played our socks off. Being so angry gave us a bit of an edge – it always did – and it was probably one of our best performances. Well, we thought so. But we never heard from Mr Stiff, or Mr Chiswick, come to that.
Sounds writer Mick Wall called the band ‘Iggy imitators’, while Paul Morley of the NME, evidently putting aside the evening’s rivalry, wrote that ‘with patience they could develop strongly and make some testing, worthwhile music.’
Even more impressed was Granada TV’s Tony Wilson, who later said, ‘It took just twenty seconds of Joy Division’s set to convince me that this really would be a band worth investing in,’ as well as Rafter’s resident DJ, Rob Gretton, who, after his experiences with the Panik, was looking for a new band to manage. That night he decided he’d found one.
‘[Joy Division] were blazing madmen,’ Gretton later said. ‘Best band I’ve ever seen. They sent a tingle up my spine. I was dancing all over [...] I went up telling them at the end, telling them how brilliant I thought it was [...] I went raving about them all next day.’
There were further developments. For some time Ian Curtis had been a regular face at the northern promotional offices of RCA Records, where he had befriended manager Derek Brandwood and his assistant, Richard Searling, a noted northern-soul DJ in his own right. Curtis had given Brandwood a copy of the An Ideal for Living EP; though Brandwood had been unimpressed, his teenage son had liked it. Not long afterwards, Brandwood and Searling were asked by the owner of the American Swan Records, Bernie Binnick, if they knew of an English punk band available to do a cover of the northern-soul track by N. F. Porter ‘Keep On Keepin’ On’ . . .
I think he’d come into contact with RCA thanks to a part-time job he’d had at Rare Records – which is quite funny, because when I’d worked at the Town Hall I bought records from there, so I’d probably bought some off him. Anyway, he’d started hanging around their offices in Piccadilly Plaza. The guys who worked there used to give him records: Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. Trouble was, the other record they gave him was this N.F. Porter song called ‘Keep On Keepin’ On’ that they wanted us to
cover – but in a punk style. God knows why. I think they thought that RCA was missing out on the Manchester punk scene and maybe thought we were their way in. Where the northern soul connection came from I cannot imagine.
We listened to the record and hated it. We tried to learn it, but it changed into something completely different, which later became our song ‘Interzone’, but we turned up our noses at the idea of doing a cover. Then, at a meeting with the RCA guys and John Anderson, who was going to produce it, Ian and Steve were offered a deal. They started to hear things like, ‘advance of £20,000’, ‘go and record in Paris’ and ‘American tours’, which made them jump around, even making Steve squeal ‘Paris’ two octaves higher than normal, according to Ian. It all turned out to be a load of rubbish, though, because although we were impressed enough to take the deal we didn’t get an advance and the studio wasn’t in Paris. It was Arrow Studios in Deansgate, Manchester, and on the day we arrived there was a voiceover guy doing an advert for Littlewoods lotteries that I can still remember now: ‘Littlewoods Lotteries. Things go better with Littlewoods . . .’ The guy kicked off proper when Ian walked in on him, tutting, ‘How unprofessional.’ We looked at each other – me, Barney, and Steve – and thought, What have we got ourselves into here?
But it was too late to back out and we ended up recording an album with John Anderson – and what a turkey it was. Everything he suggested ended up sounding cabaret and we were getting more and more frustrated, especially Ian, of course, who’d been thinking, RCA: Lou Reed, Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop . . . only to hear it come out like the most awful un-rock-’n’-roll, anti-punk, most conventional sound you can imagine. Nothing like Iggy. Nothing like the Velvets. We’d be doing, say, ‘Ice Age’, and suggest having some wild feeding-back guitars on it, but John Anderson would scratch his chin and say, ‘I was thinking more along the lines of getting some girls in to do backing vocals . . .’ Which we all know is the kiss of death.
