Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook

  Peter Saville has a wonderful theory that musicians stop writing great music when they learn about the formal process of making music. Why? Because then they won’t take any chances. When you’re young, you go, ‘G, B. Oh yeah, man, that fucking takes your head off that! Weird but sounds great!’

  Then, when you get older and you know a lot more about how music is supposed to sound, you go, ‘Oh, that G, B, that jars a little doesn’t it? Oh no, try E flat. That’s better,’ and the edge is gone. I agree with him. The more proficient you become at writing music the less chances you take because you become aware of all the rules and theories that may well be the proper way to do things but end up constricting you, throttling all the creativity out of what you’ve got. No more risk-taking. Back then we didn’t know rules or theory. We had our ear, Ian, who listened and picked out the melodies. Then at some point his lyrics would appear. He always had his scraps of paper that he’d written things down on and he’d go through his plastic bag. ‘Oh, I’ve got something that might suit that.’ And the next thing you knew he’d be standing there with a piece of paper in one hand, wrapped around the microphone stand, with his head down, making the melodies work. We’d never hear what he was singing about in rehearsal because the equipment was so shit. In his case it didn’t matter because as he delivered the vocal with such a huge amount of passion and aggression, like he really fucking meant it. It was great. Who cared what he was saying as long as he said it like that. When we were mixing Rob Gretton always use to say, ‘Make it go WOOOMPH!’ and Ian always did.

  Later, of course, I’d listen to the lyrics and try to pick them apart, but for two years in the rehearsal room all I really heard was a scream and that was what important to me. I just thought, ‘The guy means it.’ It doesn’t matter what you’re playing really, as long as you mean it.

  It was only after we recorded Unknown Pleasures that I could hear and begin to take notice of the words and it was quite startling then to see how they changed between that album, where they were still quite detached and aggressive, to Closer, which is even darker and not detached at all but really introspective and quite frightening – especially of course when you listen to it in light of what later happened.

  Still, we hadn’t yet even made an album, but because we were being so productive talk turned to making one. There was a feeling that we had enough material – enough good material – to do it, and to be perfectly frank with you we weren’t that fussy about who we made it with. As far as we were concerned there were a lot of record companies out there and they all did pretty much the same thing, which was get records out.

  Despite the fact that none of us had a fondness for London – as a place or for the record labels – we all assumed we’d end up following that well-worn path and going there. Which seemed perfectly natural to us – desirable really – because we were in a band. Nobody starts a band so they can stay in their hometown. You yearn for London and Paris and America and all that – all the freedom that comes with it. We weren’t really loyal to any Manchester scene. We’d always been a bit outside it anyway.

  Out of all of us it was Rob, of course, who was much more proManchester. Everywhere was important, not just London, he said: ‘Fuck London’ – that was one of his favourite catchphrases. We’ll do what we do here, build up a following in Manchester. We were resistant at first but he worked his magic on us (i.e. he browbeat us until we would have said anything just to make him stop) but the idea did grow on us. Lucky it did, because in retrospect he was right – absolutely right.

  So Rob went into talks with Tony about doing our record with him. The deal was a 50-50 split with the label to pay for recording and manufacture. (This deal was a mistake for Tony and Factory. He had inadvertently offered to pay the Mechanicals from their 50 per cent, so 8 per cent of the cost of the record went straight to the BPI for Mechanical royalties – and was then paid straight back to us. As Tony protested for years after, it meant that the deal was 58 per cent to 42 per cent in our favour: a bone of contention between them till the end and also sowed the seeds for when Factory couldn’t pay us all that they owed.) The deal was great on the one hand, but had a drawback: there would be no advance, so we couldn’t give up our jobs. Rob didn’t have a job, of course, but he knew that us giving up our jobs would be best for the band, giving us the freedom and time to concentrate on making music. So with the Factory offer on the table he started fishing around, making enquiries. One of the bites he had was from Genetic, a part of Radar Records, which in turn was a part of Stiff Records. They had a good reputation. They offered us a multi-album deal and £70,000 advance. That was so much money it was hard to comprehend.

  We were like, ‘Woah, woah, woah, yes!’

  Okay: me, Bernard and Steve were like, ‘Woah, yes!’ Rob, being nothing if not a man of many contradictions, had a sudden change of heart and decided he didn’t like the idea of an advance. They were like loans, he said. Fuck loans.

  ‘If you take this advance, you’ll be signed to them for five albums and if you don’t like them and they don’t work, it’s going to be a problem for your next four, isn’t it?’

  Which was absolutely true, and the £70,000 would have included recording costs as well; split between the five of us it maybe wasn’t such a great deal after all. He convinced us of this, probably in his normal intimidating way, and he did it every time we came to do our publishing deals, too, insisting: no advance. Ian would be screaming at him, and me and Barney would be screaming at him, and Steve would probably whisper something as well, but he’d never budge. He’d push his glasses up his nose and go, ‘We’re better off getting a bigger deal at the back end.’

  Of course he hated London. From the day he was born to the day he died, he hated London. So naturally it really appealed to him to stay in Manchester and have control, because Tony was offering more or less complete freedom musically. We could do what we wanted.

  So poor old Rob at this point – it must have done his head in: Genetic were in London offering an advance, and he hated London and distrusted the advance, but . . . His band could give up their jobs. Factory were in Manchester and were offering the split, and he loved Manchester and thought the split was best in the long-term, but . . . His band would have to stay working.

  His band, don’t forget, with the lead singer who suffered from epilepsy, who really needed as much rest as possible.

  So there was plenty of um-ing and ah-ing. In the meantime Martin Rushent invited us down to the studio to record some demos, just to see if we were going to gel. He’d produced the Buzzcocks and the Stranglers by this point so we were very excited by the prospect and went down there.

  Rushent was based in offices above the Blitz club in Great Queen Street, where he’d been monitoring the early appearances of the major players in the burgeoning New Romantic scene. His assistant, Anne Roseberry, had seen Joy Division in Manchester and told Rushent about it; Rushent in turn saw them and said, ‘My jaw hit the floor.’ Keen to try them out for his own label, Genetic, he invited them to his Berkshire studio, Eden.

  When we got there we saw that Martin Rushent had a brand-new Jaguar XJS – and as it happened I’d been reading this article about how nine out of ten Jag owners don’t lock the boot of their car.

  So I thought, I wonder if that’s true? – tried his boot and, lo and behold, it was unlocked. When I looked inside it was full of stolen car radios; you could tell they were stolen by the way the wires were dangling off from where they’d been ripped out.

  Me and Terry were looking at each other, thinking, Fuck. Martin’s got a boot full of stolen car radios. And then, Wonder if he’d miss a couple . . .

  All day, actually, whenever there was a break in the recording, we’d be daring each other to go back in his boot and nick one each for our cars – because they were proper high-end stereos – but I was going, ‘Oh no, we can’t, because he might be our record company. We can’t nick fucking cassette players off our record company.’

 
; So we didn’t take any. Christ knows what he was doing with them, though. We never asked him, and anyway he was too busy moaning about the boil on his bum. It was giving him real gyp and he was in agony with it. So much that he couldn’t sleep in his bed and had to sleep in his car instead – couldn’t get comfortable otherwise.

  He went on about that a lot, his boil, and it meant he kept having to get up to walk around and ease the pain, but otherwise the session was great. It was a really nice studio and he worked well with Ian on the vocals, did a few overdubs and stuff, nothing wild, very low key. The tracks were ‘Glass’, ‘Transmission’, ‘Ice Age’, ‘Insight’ and ‘Digital’. He was a nice guy; we got on well. He was a lot better than Martin Hannett in one respect: he spoke English and you could understand what he said. But he was nowhere near as exciting or unpredictable and, to be honest, once I’d heard the results I much preferred Hannett’s production to his.

  I got offered the tape of that session back, recently. Eden Studios was taken over by a firm of solicitors and left in a storeroom, hidden in the bowels of it, were the Joy Division master tapes. One of the staff found them. He got in touch with me through a third party to offer me the tape. He wanted £50,000 for it and I just thought, Oh, fuck off. This was in 2006 or something. Even then there was no way on earth you could make a record and hope to recoup fifty grand. I offered him a finder’s fee, two grand, but he said no and I’ve never heard from him since; it’s never appeared, so I don’t know what’s happened to that one. They used monitor mixes for the Eden versions on the Heart and Soul box set but I was offered the twenty-four-track master tapes, so it could have been remixed. Shame, because as far as I know the only Joy Division multi-track that still exists is for ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.

  Ah well. It’s a funny thing, people trying to sell you back bits of your own past, but I’m getting used to it, to be honest. We have the same problem even with studio staff. When Strawberry Studios closed someone spirited a load of master tapes straight from the skip to their parents’ loft. I caught them hawking the tapes round a few Joy Division collectors. They wanted £20,000. I patiently explained how you can’t make any money these days, what with illegal downloading, etc., and offered the usual £2,000 finder’s fee. They sneered, ‘I’d rather deal with Steve and Gillian!’ I instigated legal proceedings on that one. But lo and behold, one day, as we were negotiating, their car got broken into and all the tapes and digital copies got stolen. They even had the police-report number. Ah well, the ones that got away. Although in this day and age I challenge any thief to even recognize thirty-year-old recording tapes, let alone know what to do with them. They are huge. Strangely enough they were hawking the same tapes around again a few months later. The thief must have returned them.

  ‘It sounds like a fucking helicopter’

  Pleased with the demos he’d recorded with Joy Division, Rushent brought them to the attention of Genetic’s owner, Warner, who were less impressed, reportedly telling him to forget about Joy Division and the New Romantic groups and concentrate instead on finding the new Angelic Upstarts. History was to prove Rushent correct, not only in the case of Joy Division but also with Visage, Ultravox and Spandau Ballet, while he would go on to produce the Human League’s masterpiece, Dare. Either way, Joy Division had decided not to join Genetic, wanting the greater artistic freedom of their relationship with Factory as well as preferring the financial terms offered. During Joy Division’s gig at Band on the Wall on 13 March, Gretton and Wilson agreed that Joy Division would record their debut album with Factory, with all concerned assuming that the band would make just one album with the label before moving on to a major.

  So what actually happened was that we were presented with two very different scenarios: London plus advance and small profit split or Manchester with no advance but great profit split. We all plumped for the latter. We thought that as long as we were able to stay at home and play the songs we were writing, that was enough. Everything else would be a bonus. In the end it was an easy decision to make. We met with Tony and told him our decision. He was delighted and must have thought, Fuck this is a great band, we need to get them on a record and get it out right away. He was absolutely right.

  Even so, it was a bit of a wrench because we still had in our minds the idea that if we had a contract with an advance, and could give up our day jobs, everything would be fine and dandy. Follow the Yellow Brick Road. But what Rob and Tony were suggesting was not giving up our jobs, taking an independent-label deal, which meant that you had to put a lot more work in and there was no safety net and all the things that you normally do in a group full-time you had to do at the same time as you were working. You’d still be doing the gigs, coming home sometimes at six in the morning and then having to go to work at seven. Which was, like I say, exhausting.

  But Rob convinced us it was the best thing to do. The deal was great – probably the best deal a band had ever had, actually. For us to make any money, though, we had to make a great record that sold well. So the pressure was on. We prepared for the sessions with two storming gigs. The first was at Bowdon Vale Youth Club, where we were being filmed by Malcolm Whitehead as part of his short film about Joy Division. It was a cracking gig and one I really remember because I felt at the time that we were very nearly the finished article. For a start we looked like a great group. If you see the film, I’m getting the swagger on and Bernard’s more into himself, doing his not-moving-type thing, which made a nice contrast. We sounded good too. Personally speaking I was really pleased with the bass sound pretty much from then on. I’m sure Ian wouldn’t mind me saying that a lot of the vocal lines were guided by the bass and I was coming up with some good riffs. I mean, going down the set list for the Bowdon Vale gig, just look at the bass lines: ‘Exercise One’, ‘She’s Lost Control’, ‘Shadowplay’, ‘Insight’, ‘Disorder’, ‘Glass’, ‘Digital’, ‘Transmission’, ‘I Remember Nothing’. You stand and fall on your riffs and I was just amazingly, sickeningly lucky in that I was coming up with them. To write something like ‘She’s Lost Control’ and have the whole song based around it. That’s one of our most famous songs, really personal to Ian, and for him to base those lyrics around my riff was so fucking cool. As a player I was being featured very highly, was an integral part of the sound of the band, which was great for me, a wonderful platform. To be a part of something like that when I was a) tone deaf and b) self-taught was amazing.

  It wasn’t all roses, though. I still had to drive the fucking van. That kept my feet firmly on the ground as well as causing me no end of problems, not least of which was paying for the maintenance. Because you might think that if something went wrong with the van then paying for it would come out of the group purse. You might think that. You’d be wrong. Anything like the clutch going, a puncture, a flat tyre, and I had to pay for it. I’d go to Rob and say, ‘Listen, I’ve had to pay for this tyre.’

  And he’d go, ‘Well? What’s that fucking got to do with me? I’m not paying for your fucking van; you fucking pay for it.’

  On our way to our next gig, in Walthamstow, we were driving down the motorway when the van’s top hose split and water blew on the distributor cap. It backfired and peeled the exhaust like a banana.

  We pulled over.

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘We’ve got to fucking go,’ said Rob. ‘We’ve got a fucking gig.’

  I said, ‘Fuck off. I can’t drive through London like that, with no exhaust. It sounds like a fucking helicopter.’

  He was going, ‘No, no, it’s fine, fine – we’ll fix it when we get to Dave Pils’ house.’

  They all piled back in the Cortina and we had to drive all the way down the motorway, which wasn’t too bad, actually, apart from the fact that me, Terry and Twinny were completely deaf by the time we got there. We drove through North London to Walthamstow, parked up, and I said to Dave, ‘Listen, we’re going to have to get it fixed.’

  ‘Kwik Fit round the corner,’ he said.r />
  I didn’t have any money, of course, and looked at Rob, who said, ‘Well I’ll lend you the money to fix the van.’

  ‘Lend us the money? I can’t afford to pay for the fucking thing myself.’

  So he gave me the cash and I went to Kwik Fit and got it sorted – £13 for a new exhaust – and while I was out they’d had a group meeting at Dave Pils’ house. Waited till I was out, the rotten bastards, and had a group vote.

  ‘We’ve decided that we’re not paying for it,’ said Rob when I got back. ‘We’ll lend it to you but you’ve got to give us the money back.’

  I said, ‘Right, from now on you can hire a van because I’m not fucking paying to drive you twats about when you’re keeping the gig money and I have to fork out. Fuck off, the lot of you.’

  I stormed out, didn’t I. Went for a walk round the block, calmed down and when I got back to Dave Pils’ house they were all sat in the living room.

  Rob said, ‘It’s all right, Hooky, we’re going to pay for it.’ So it was sorted. I didn’t have to pay back the money. I was still pissed off, and would pretty much stay pissed off until 13 August, when . . . Well, we’ll come to that.

  In the meantime, we had an album to record. Sheesh!

  ‘He was looking for that spark’

  Strawberry Studios in Stockport is offices now, but for years it was the major studio in the North West. If you go to where it is in Waterloo Road they have one of those blue plaques up with a list of all the legendary artists who recorded there: Paul McCartney, Neil Sedaka, Stone Roses and the Syd Lawrence Orchestra.