by Peter Hook
Holy shit. It was awful. We ended up recording eleven or twelve songs with him, all the ones that ended up on the album, which – despite the fact that we were hoping it would never see the light of day, please, God – has since been bootlegged to death. Then we left the studio with our tails between our legs, feeling worse than ever.
We couldn’t even get gigs. All the other groups in Manchester were trying to be a bit arty, like the Buzzcocks, but we weren’t. We were just dead working class and had no pretentions. Ian, I suppose you’d say, was the most pretentious of us, with his love of Burroughs and Kafka and whatever, but I think when other groups looked at us they saw a bunch of yobs. So we were getting pushed out; we felt like outsiders, and nobody wanted us to play.
Not long after that I remember being manager again. I phoned up the Elephant & Castle one day from work and in my best phone voice said, ‘Can I speak to the booker, please?’
And she went. ‘All right, darlin’, I’ll put you through to the booker.’ And then she went, ‘Hello, booker, Elephant & Castle.’
And I said, ‘Oh, hello there. My name’s Peter Hook. I play in a band called Joy Division and we’re trying to get support gigs in London . . .’
She stopped me. ‘What was that? What was your name?’
‘Joy Division.’
‘Listen darlin’,’ she said, ‘you’ll never get a gig in London with a name like Joy Division,’ and hung up.
I didn’t know what she meant but it didn’t matter. I stared at the phone thinking, Typical. Shit album. Shit single. No gigs. We were at a very low ebb.
All I can say is: thank fuck Rob Gretton came along.
‘We need to get rid of this Nazi artwork’
Barney was out from work in one of the phone boxes by Spring Gardens Post Office, talking to Steve, when suddenly this guy yanked open the door. A big bloke with a beard, wearing glasses that he pushed up his nose before he spoke.
‘Fucking hell. You’re out of Joy Division, aren’t you?’
It was Rob.
‘I watched you at the Stiff /Chiswick night,’ he carried on. ‘I want to be your manager.’
Christ, did we need a manager. Barney hung up on Steve, chatted to Rob and invited him down to see us at T. J. Davidson’s.
Of course, Barney then promptly forgot and didn’t tell any of us, did he? We were standing around playing when Rob came in, perched himself on the edge of a step and sat there, nodding in time to the music.
Me, Steve and Ian were looking at each other, like, Who’s this? – with Barney off in his own little world, obviously. Then the song finished and there was an awkward silence as gradually we turned our attention to Rob, who looked at us, still nodding, as though he was pleased with what he’d heard. Until at last Barney said, ‘Oh, lads, I forget to mention. This is Rob Gretton. He’s the DJ at Rafters. He saw us play the Stiff/Chiswick night. He wants to be our manager.’
There was a collective sigh of relief. I wasn’t the only who hated managerial duties: Ian couldn’t do it; Steve couldn’t do it; Barney couldn’t do it; Terry certainly couldn’t do it, God bless him. But without one we were fucked, so this was like offering a straw to a drowning man. Plus, of course, we liked Rob straight away; he seemed to know what he was talking about, probably because he’d already managed the Panik and had a lot of band experience working with Rabid and Slaughter & the Dogs. And, even though we hated Slaughter & the Dogs, and Rob had had precisely zero success with the Panik and in truth had the same managerial experience we all had, he seemed to say the right things.
The first being: ‘This record’s shit.’ (Straight-talking would become his forte.)
He held up a copy of our An Ideal for Living EP.
‘Yeah,’ we mumbled.
He pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘What we need to do is get it remastered. We need to make it into a twelve-inch.’
He was already referring to us as ‘we’, which I liked. This was someone who was on our side.
Next he pointed at the picture of the Hitler Youth drummer. ‘We need to get rid of this Nazi artwork, too.’
Music to our ears and to Ian’s especially; he was desperate to recoup the money that he’d borrowed from the bank for his non-existent furniture – to get Debbie off his back as much anything.
So one of the first things Rob did was recover the masters and repress An Ideal for Living as a twelve-inch with a different cover, a picture of some scaffolding on King Street, solving both the sound and Nazi problems. Next he persuaded Tosh Ryan of Rabid Records, which was Slaughter & the Dogs’ label, to buy and distribute the rest of the seven-inches along with the twelve-inches. Paying us up front. The seven-inch ended up having an official release in June, the twelve-inch in October, and in one fell swoop Ian was paid off.
Now that is how you start off managing a group. We’d told him all about the Arrow Studios debacle and he cut a deal with John Anderson, offering him a grand for the master tapes. From then on any gig money we earned went into a pot managed by Rob, until we had enough to pay John Anderson and retrieve the tapes. (How, if we bought back the masters, did the record later appear as a bootleg, you might ask? That’s a very good question, but one I can’t answer here, because I’ve already given enough money to lawyers and have no desire to give them any more, thank you very much.)
By this time I’d sold the Jag and saved enough cash to buy an old petrol-blue Transit van. I was over the moon about that because I was sick of squeezing the gear in my car, or having to hire a van when we needed to take our own PA, which was a total ball-ache. I’d crashed a hired Bedford van when we did Pips. Only a little bit. It had a side hinge that jutted out from the door and I’d hit another car, taking the paint off and bending it a little bit. For that the rental place swiped my £20 deposit, but the rest of the group said it was my fault and refused to chip in. So having my own van was a massive relief. From then on, I drove it and all the gear, Terry and Twinny came with me, while all the rest of the group went in Steve’s car. Having it made us more self-sufficient and meant that as long as Rob could get us gigs we could earn money. And he was good at getting us gigs.
In fact, from the moment he stepped on board things changed for us: because we couldn’t organize shit and he could. You watch Control and the character comes into our lives like a whirlwind, with a big personality right from the start, but in real life it wasn’t really like that. At first, he was calm, rational, quietly spoken and very logical, always scribbling away in his notebooks. Later he got more like his character in Control, when he became a very domineering, almost intimidating personality – he was a big guy and he used it. He could cut you dead and often did. He had a biting tongue. But in him we knew we had someone who shared our vision and had the same ideals, who wasn’t going to suggest we hired backing singers or recorded northern soul covers. He was like us, but a larger-than-life version of us, a more forthright us.
Things started to happen right off the bat. I mean, apart from what I’ve already mentioned, just look at the way we started to develop when he became our manager: the relationship with Tony Wilson began, and we all know where that led; he got us involved with the Musicians’ Collective, so we started playing gigs regularly; and we began getting known among the promoters. All of that gave us confidence to grow, leave Rob to go off and to do the shit we didn’t like to do and concentrate on doing things we did. (Writing songs.)
We got better and better – we could tell, because a song like ‘Transmission’ suddenly was stopping traffic. I remember the first time. It was at the Mayflower club, Belle Vue on 20 May 1978, a gig we did with Emergency and the Risk. The Mayflower was a horrible hole with a pond of rainwater in front of the stage where the roof had gone and let all the water in like a moat. Normally we wouldn’t have gone within a mile of the place but we did it as a favour to Emergency, who we knew very well. It was a bit of a you-scratch-my-back-and-we’ll-scratch-yours set-up: we used to borrow their PA for out-of-town gigs and in return would hel
p them out when we could. At this particular gig at the Mayflower they were promoting themselves as headliners, so they wanted decent support; they asked us if we’d do it, knowing we’d bring a few people along.
Rob was there with us that night – his first gig in charge – and it was also when we first met Oz McCormick and Ed, from Oz PA, who did the gig on the night and ended up being our sound guys for years. Right through Joy Division and New Order, out-front and fold-back respectively.
Not only that but we got plenty of time for a sound-check, during which we played ‘Transmission’. We’d recorded it for the awful Arrow album but we hated that version and we’d worked on it a lot since – so this was the first time anybody outside of our circle had heard it as we wanted it to be heard. The funny thing about writing a song – any song – is that you never know how good it is when you write it. The last one always seems the best. We were lucky in Joy Division that we wrote several songs that are regarded as absolute classics: ‘Digital’, ‘Disorder’, ‘Transmission’, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, ‘Atmosphere’, ‘Shadowplay’, ‘She’s Lost Control’. But we never thought, This is a classic. That isn’t your place. We knew they were all right, mind you. But the best we hoped for was that they matched up to the calibre of the other stuff, the stuff we knew people liked. It was only when we played them live and gauged the reaction that we started to get an idea of how good they really were.
Playing ‘Transmission’ there was probably the first time that we had a real stop-the-press moment. I distinctly remember playing it at that sound-check and the crew turning around, the guys in Emergency and the other support band, the Risk, coming front of stage to watch us; the PA guys, too, were watching us instead of getting on with stuff.
We were looking at each other, like, What the fuck’s going on here? because we’d never experienced that kind of reaction before. Looking at each other we were thinking that, maybe, just maybe, we might be able to make a go of this, a living out of it. We might just be able to pull this off. It was a big moment for the band. A big confidence-booster.
The gig itself, well, it went off all right, apart from the Risk’s bassist getting a hiding from some of the crowd. Poor bloke was wearing a T-shirt that said, ‘My fists are my side-arms’ and I can distinctly remember standing there during sound-check, seeing this T-shirt and thinking, That’s a bold statement. You’ve got to be fairly confident to carry off a T-shirt like that.
His band were a bit of a nuisance, to be honest: they spent the whole night arguing with us and Emergency. So I’ve got to say – and God strike me down for it – I wasn’t that bothered when a section of the crowd took exception to his T-shirt, dragged him off the stage and leathered him. Funnily enough, his fists weren’t his side-arms.
Otherwise it was a great gig and as a band we were breathing one long, giant sigh of relief because Rob had parachuted in to take a whole load of pressure off us. Before, with managers – well, Terry, then each other – we’d always be looking over the shoulder of whoever was doing it, to make sure everything was being done properly, and then moaning accordingly. It was strange: when someone else was doing it you knew you could do it better, but when you did it everything went wrong. With Rob we didn’t do that. He’d have told us to fuck off and kicked us if we’d dared.
Another of Gretton’s managerial duties involved corresponding with Tony Wilson about his new protégés. On 19 April 1978 Wilson replied to his letter saying the band were the best thing he had heard in Manchester ‘for about six months’. Nevertheless, Ian’s desire for Joy Division to appear on So It Goes was not to be. Wilson’s music programme had ended, and as a result he was looking for new ways to stay involved in the music business. At the same time his friend Alan Erasmus ended his association with Fast Breeder and the two cast about for ideas, taking on management of the fledgling Durutti Column. They looked into venues in the hope of featuring the band and settled on the Russell Club, which they booked for four Fridays over two months. Located on Royce Road in Hulme and run by colourful local character Don Tonay, the Russell Club had been used by drivers for the bus company SELNEC and was well placed to appeal to the nearby student population. Erasmus saw a sign saying ‘Factory Clearance’ and suggested ‘Factory’ as a name for the club. To design a poster Wilson hired the services of graphic designer Peter Saville, who had introduced himself to Wilson at a Patti Smith concert. Saville earned £20 for the design, which used the colour scheme of the UK’s National Car Parks and included a ‘warning’ sign from his college workshop; he also misspelt the club’s name as ‘Russel’ (this error was repeated – perhaps intentionally – for the next two Factory club posters). Famously Saville delivered his poster – which was later given the catalogue number FAC 1 – two weeks into the four-week run.
In the meantime, Tony Wilson had written to Gretton a second time, on 9 May, reiterating how much he liked the An Ideal for Living EP and inviting Joy Division to play at the new club. They did, on the fourth night of the initial run, 9 June 1978, supporting the Tiller Boys.
The Tiller Boys were very wacky. They stood chairs up in front of them on stage so you couldn’t see what they were doing and played tape loops, probably inspired by the Pop Group and Throbbing Gristle. Cabaret Voltaire without the songs, really, which is saying something. That’s about all I remember about that gig, funnily enough, despite the fact that it was the first Factory event to involve us and that it marked the beginning of a period during which we started to play a lot more regularly, really honing our sound and getting the message out there.
Rob had got us to join the Manchester Musicians’ Collective, which used to meet in a room above the Sawyers Arms pub in the city centre. Dick Witts from the Passage was chairman and the idea was that all Manchester’s musicians would get together and support each other, to stop some of the backbiting and treachery that generally went on between local bands. If truth be told, we revelled in the backbiting and treachery (would we have been as good at the Stiff/Chiswick night if the Negatives hadn’t pissed us off? Probably not) but we wanted to get gigs. So despite that, and the fact that we secretly thought the whole thing was a bit poncey, we went along and listened. We’d heard they were going to put on a gig a month at the Band on the Wall, and we desperately wanted to play.
The collective was on to them. In the sleeve notes to the album Messthetics #106: The Manchester Musicians’ Collective 1977–1982, Kevin Eden of the Elite says, ‘Joy Division joined and there was initially some grumbling that they were trying to grab gigs, but they allowed MMC to use their gear when possible.’
So on the one hand we got to play more but this did mean that every now and then we had to meet to discuss music, which I thought was a monumental drag because they were so earnest and arty about it all and frankly it was like being back at school – like in a society or something. Steve didn’t go, as far as I can remember, but me, Ian and Barney had to. Ian thought it was all right, mind you. He liked anything arty.
Meanwhile, the An Ideal for Living twelve-inch EP came out, and at last we had a record we could be proud of. Then the Short Circuit album came out, and suddenly we looked like part of a movement. As well as playing loads of gigs around that time we had a go at promoting; one such instance was at Band on the Wall, where we got a bit more ‘Insight’ into Rob’s character.
What he’d done was spend all our money on a big PA because he believed we should sound the best we could and present ourselves in the best possible way. Not a bad philosophy, of course – no one’s going to argue with that. Got a gig, all sold out, lots of profit? Let’s put it all into a bigger PA and more lights. Nobody I’ve ever never met was as talented at spending money as Rob Gretton: he was the proverbial Big Spender – and that gig at the Band on the Wall saw the seeds of his philosophy being sown.
Only one of us noticed at the time, though: Ian. Before Rob came on board he was the one with the ideas. Musically he’d introduced us to loads of new stuff – Kraftwerk, Throbbing Gristle, Vel
vet Underground, the Doors, Can and Faust – and when it came to the direction of the band he was always the most forthright. He had the plan and the rest of us were his tools to carry it out, if you like. Having someone new arrive with plans of his own – notebooks full of them, in fact – well, there were bound to be problems. The rest of us were going, ‘Yeah, yeah, do whatever you want, Rob.’ Might as well have had rings through our noses, we were that easily led. But not Ian. It didn’t take long for the pair of them to bang heads, the two dominant personalities of the group fighting for control.
The other thing Ian had to deal with was Debbie being pregnant. Not that Ian ever announced it as such; the news just gradually leaked out, but there it was – soon he’d have another mouth to feed. So there was even more reason why Rob’s grand gesture didn’t go down too well. Ian was probably thinking, My slice of that PA would have bought a pram.
Tell you what, though: it was a good PA and we did sound amazing. So Rob was right, I suppose – particularly because it turned out to be one of those gigs that did wonders for our profile. We got two good reviews from that gig, one in Sounds and one in NME, from Paul Morley, our former mortal enemy, who was comparing us to Magazine and the Fall, the two big post-punk groups. Then – at last – we got on the telly.
Joy Division’s first TV appearance was on Granada Reports What’s On, which was then in the habit of pre-recording local bands to broadcast when news slots suddenly became vacant. So it was that on 20 September 1978 presenter Bob Greaves, speaking live, introduced Joy Division by saying, ‘We hope that we’re launching them on a real “joy ride” as we have so many other others, haven’t we, Tony?’ Then there was a cut to a prerecorded Tony Wilson, who said, ‘Seeing as how this is the programme which previously brought you first television appearances from everything from the Beatles to the Buzzcocks, we do like to keep our hand in and keep you informed of the most interesting new sounds in the North West. This, Joy Division, is the most interesting sound we’ve come across in the last six months. They’re a Manchester band (with the exception of the guitarist, who comes from Salford – very important difference). They’re called Joy Division and this number is “‘Shadowplay’”.’
