Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook

  No mention of us, the bastards. Even though that was there we went in April 1979 to record our debut album (and, later, to record ‘Transmission’ and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, among others). Tony Wilson always gave massive credit to 10CC for putting Strawberry in Stockport. The way he saw it, they’d reinvested the money they made from their music back into Manchester. He was right. Thanks to them we had one of the country’s best studios on our doorstep, and we were pretty excited about it: our first foray into twenty-four-track recording, with the ability to overdub, in four-star luxury. We were once again being produced by Martin, who was using all sorts of great gear. The AMS, of course, as well as the Marshall Time Modulators (Marshall Time Wasters, the engineers called them), which he used a lot on the guitar, especially on some of Bernard’s more . . . economical playing, shall we say. So to be honest it felt like such a thrill. Like taking the next big step up. We were all raring to go and happy and had enthusiasm to burn.

  If only I’d known then what I know now I’d have savoured making our first album – because by the time we got to the second one there were already divisions beginning to form and we were very worried about Ian. Martin was having a hard time with the drugs so it got very fraught and very stressful. Then, on Movement, the first New Order album – well, we were fucked from that album on as far as I’m concerned. Whatever record we were making from that point on, there was always some elephant in the room. Whether it was Ian’s death, or business matters, personal disputes, the Haçienda sucking the life out of us or Factory going to the wall, there was always something. Always an elephant. Should have given it a catalogue number.

  There was no elephant on Unknown Pleasures, though. It turned out to be the only album we made where we were focused, and relaxed, and enjoyed the wonderfulness of being young and in a band and going in to record your debut album on your new label with a producer who had mad hair and looked like a wizard and spoke in riddles.

  He told us we needed forty minutes’ worth of music for the album so we presented him with a batch of songs. Of those we recorded sixteen, ten of which were used on the album, all recorded at the weekend. We all had jobs in the week. No advance, remember. And it was cheaper at weekends. Even cheaper if we worked at night, which suited Martin down to the ground, of course, because he liked to work at night. So the band would arrive at the studio straight after work on Friday, record until seven in the morning, then return later in the evening on the Saturday and work until seven in the morning. We’d be going home at seven on Monday morning, trying to escape before the cleaner arrived and started Hoovering. Even now the sound of a Hoover goes right through me. We recorded for the first two weekends and Martin mixed the third weekend. So that was two days to record Unknown Pleasures. Closer took three weeks. Movement took about two months and Waiting for the Siren’s Call, New Order’s last, took three years.

  Usually when a band went into the studio, back in the late seventies anyway, you’d have one eye on the clock and be concentrating on not messing around. The accepted way of doing this was to get the band in the studio and get them sounding as live as possible. There was no such thing as click tracks or backing tracks in those days. It was all recorded live. So for the most part what we used to do was go in and run through all of the tracks in one go, with Ian in the room – he’d do the vocal in isolation later, when we had the take. Now, normally when you record a band you have a microphone on each of the instruments, and each records to a track on the master tape, but you get a bit of leakage from one microphone to another, so you’ll get a bit of the bass down the guitar mic and so on. If you want to feature, say, the guitar more prominently, then you turn up the guitar track, but because of the sound spill the other instruments come up, too. Martin hated that.

  Martin being Martin wanted the live feel of the band playing but without sacrificing the clarity of the instruments. So he set us up to get maximum separation, and the way he did that was to record us separately, especially the drums. Martin wanted them isolated so he could work on the drum sound, which of course he ended up doing a lot, creating that very clean, precise-sounding, almost clinical drum sound that became his trademark.

  Of course, it was only much later, when we heard the finished product, that we knew what he was going on about. What we heard at the time was Martin and Chris Nagle, his engineer, constantly going on and on about keeping everything clean and separate, right from the start, the very opposite of what we wanted. The first song we played him was ‘She’s Lost Control’. He loved the drums on it, he said; then said it would be great if they were separate. Next thing we knew he was getting Steve to take his kit apart. Off came the snare and the toms. Martin wanted zero spill from the mics so he had to record each drum individually. Of course that meant that Steve was rarely playing his whole kit. He was allowed to play only one drum at a time and ghosted the others. So what happened was that we ran through ‘She’d Lost Control’ live, then Martin recorded the drum track, we took the kit apart and Steve played his parts again – one drum at a time. It made everything very laborious and really hard for Steve, because he didn’t have a click track to keep time to, so he kept speeding up and slowing down. Steve had to learn how to play the kit, but play it like a drum machine. He once said that his ambition wasn’t to be a drum machine but Martin demanded the separation. It even got to the point where Martin was taking the drums themselves apart, taking the tightening springs out, because he said they squeaked. Only he could hear it.

  Of course it had to be done in a matter of hours. If you went into the studio now and wanted to recreate the sound of Unknown Pleasures it would probably take you years. But we were young and Martin was pushing us, and it had to be done double-quick, so it was a constant battle between Martin’s desire to experiment and the time we had left in the studio. We worked very quickly. None of that farting about – all that happened later. For Unknown Pleasures we’d go in with our list of songs. We’d set up the instruments, sound-check, ‘Right, “‘Disorder’”.’

  We’d play ‘Disorder’.

  ‘Is that all right, Martin?’

  ‘No, didn’t like it. Try it slower but faster. Meaner but kinder.’

  We’d look at each other like, Oh, do fuck off.

  We’d play ‘Disorder’ again.

  ‘How was that, Martin?’

  ‘That was better, yeah, a bit on the buttery side but fine; we’ll go with that one.’

  So then we had our master. Ten backing tracks, ready for editing, manipulating and adding to. Next Martin would record the drums, and often he’d get Barney to put some heavier guitar on top, too; he was a big fan of layering the recordings. He’d do the vocals last, right at the end, so they were clean without any spill from the instruments. When it came to the vocals Tony suddenly became very vocal, suggesting strongly that Ian listen to Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits so he could incorporate a bit of Frank’s crooner style into the vocal lines. This made us all laugh and, while I didn’t hear a direct influence on Ian’s vocal style, I was quite surprised to see a few lyrical references of Frank’s in the lyrics. Notably ‘I Remember Nothing’ with its ‘We were strangers’ refrain. Strangers in the night, anyone?

  The band had its first studio row, actually, the first of many over the years, because Barney insisted on using infrared headphones and adjusting the levels to fit them, even though it fucked up the levels for the rest of us, plus we fell out a couple of times over songs that he didn’t like and was reluctant to play. Martin had encouraged us to write a couple more in the studio so we had a better choice for the L P. Me and Steve jammed out ‘From Safety to Where’ and ‘Candidate’. Ian then worked on vocals. Barney didn’t like that song either and his reluctance to play on it was marked. Martin had to turn the tape over so the songs were backward. He liked them then and played. Martin span it over so the tracks had backward guitars and a few fed-up-sounding EEEKS! Apart from that, it was a pretty peaceful atmosphere, which was mainly down to Martin, of course, beca
use he wasn’t yet the tyrant he later became.

  Back then he smoked a bit of dope but he wasn’t into heroin, as far as I know. To be honest, I don’t think he had the money for it. His drug problem really only became a problem for us when it came to Movement, when he refused to start the session until we brought him a gram of coke. ‘Where the fuck are we going to get a gram of coke from?’ We’d never even seen cocaine. (At that point, I mean. We’d certainly put that right later.)

  ‘I’m not fucking starting until you bring me a gram of Columbia’s finest,’ he insisted, and then sat there for hours with his arms folded while the rest of us tried to persuade him to begin the session. After phoning God knows how many people, Rob laid his hands on some and brought it into the studio.

  ‘Right,’ said Martin, handing it over to Chris Nagle, ‘You sort that out, Christopher, and I’ll get started.’

  What a twat, we thought. All that fucking time wasted. Never is the saying ‘time is money’ truer than when you’re in the studio. The average cost then was £1 per recording track per hour (so, for example, twenty-four-track: £24 per hour). Fair enough, I suppose; he was struggling. It’s a well-known fact that he took Ian’s death hard. I mean, recording ‘Ceremony’ and ‘In a Lonely Place’ was easier because Ian had left the lyrics and the vocal lines for those two, so it was only our vocal efforts that amused and frustrated him. But doing Movement he found the album tough going from the start, and he let us know it. It was like that great car with the wonky wheel again. Martin was constantly having to fix New Order and he wasn’t in good enough physical or mental shape to do it. He was off his peak. We all were.

  He hated that we used to bug the shit out of him, me and Bernard especially. One on either side. Always on his case. Questioning everything. ‘Why are you doing that?’ ‘Isn’t it too quiet?’ ‘Isn’t it too loud?’ ‘More bass!’ ‘More guitar!’ ‘More everything.’ Ian was much more easygoing, and perhaps that’s why he was Martin’s favourite. But maybe Ian was more easy-going because there was only so much Martin could to the vocals, whereas he could do a lot to the instruments. And he did a lot to the instruments. Which was, after all, what he was there to do. As a sound-manipulator Martin was in a class of his own, and the atmosphere, clarity and depth he gave to the songs is still astonishing.

  He was lucky, though. Like I know myself, when you’re producing a band and they come in with great songs you rub your hands with glee, because you can have such fun with a great song. But when someone brings you a poor or average song you have to start changing it and you’re thinking, Can we write a better middle eight? Can we improve the chorus? That’s not as much fun. It can be really hard work.

  Martin had fun with Joy Division because the songs were so fantastic. He didn’t have as much fun with Movement because, while the music was fantastic, we were lacking confidence on the lyrics and vocals. Struggling to do them to his satisfaction. We were feeling our way in the dark. He knew that and it pissed him off. And, along with fires and infestations of rats, the one thing you don’t want in a studio is a pissed-off Martin Hannett because he was ruthless, a right dictator at times. Derek Brandwood, who ended up managing him towards the end of his career, once said that you could put him in a studio with a band with who’d been the best of friends for forty years and within five minutes Martin would have them at each other’s throats. So true.

  His bag was winding people up. I remember he made Bernard sing ‘Cries & Whispers’ by New Order forty-three times. He wanted a complete take and if there was one error, or what Martin thought was an error, he made Bernard do it again. Barney was totally pissed off with it all, and quite rightly so, but Martin fed off that. You could see the look in his eyes, like, This’ll get him. He was looking for that spark, something intangible. But to him always a catalytic spark.

  Did he get it? Well, it would be great if this particular anecdote ended with Bernard doing the performance of his life and ‘Cries & Whispers’ becoming one of our greatest songs, but it doesn’t because we told Martin to fuck off and stormed out. So no, he didn’t get it. What he got was band and producer at each other’s throats, which was all part of his divide-and-conquer ethic. And if you were looking for any support from Chris Nagle you might as well forget it: Martin’s big thing was that the group should do their bit and then piss off, and Chris was very much his right-hand man on that. Even though he was our age he always took Martin’s side against the group and the pair of them would visibly gang up on you, sniggering together like schoolgirls if you suggested anything.

  I’d go, ‘Can we turn up the high-hat, Martin, please?’ and the pair of them would look at each other and dissolve into giggles.

  I’d be like, ‘What’s so fucking funny about that? What’s so fucking funny about turning up the high-hat?’ But the pair of them would sit there sniggering like bastards. Infuriating.

  If that failed they would try to freeze us out. They sat at the desk in the middle of the room, where it was warm, while we had to sit at the back under the air-conditioning that they’d jammed on full to get rid of us. Barney had to produce the sleeping bag yet again. It wouldn’t have been so bad if 10CC had kept the heating on at night, the tight bastards. But you literally had icicles hanging off your nose.

  When we’d finished recording we had to decide what songs were going on the album and in what order. Looking back now at the tracks we recorded, I’d say that ‘Exercise One’, ‘Only Mistake’, ‘They Walked in Line’ and ‘The Kill’ were a bit punkier than the tracks we ended up picking, and maybe didn’t fit in with the album so well. ‘Exercise One’ is the best one. ‘Only Mistake’ is a good song as well. ‘They Walked in Line’ and ‘The Kill’ are a bit too punky, a bit throwaway.

  Once we’d decided what was going to make the cut, Martin tuned it so that each song was in a sympathetic key, so it didn’t jar but instead sounds like a smooth, ear-pleasing progression rather than a harsh transition, like harmonic mixing – so ‘Disorder’ into ‘Day of the Lords’ was in tune and so on and so on. Martin introduced us to all that. Very, very clever.

  Then we could hear it, of course.

  I can’t remember if we were there for the mixing. Maybe not. As I said, Martin hated us hanging around when we weren’t playing, getting on his nerves. ‘Get these fucking musicians out of here,’ he’d scream.

  He used to say ‘musicians’ like it was a swear word. What difference it would have made to the finished article if we’d been sitting on his shoulder while he mixed it I couldn’t say. Back then we didn’t know enough about the process to have much of an opinion. All we saw was him pressing buttons. He could have been releasing squadrons of bats for all we knew. So whether we were there or not, Martin mixed Unknown Pleasures his way.

  Ian and Steve loved it. Me and Barney hated it. We thought it was too weak. We wanted it to be miles heavier. We wanted it to go RARRGH! And instead it went ptish. All the things I now love about the album – the spacey, echoey ambient sound of it – were all the things I hated about it when I first heard it.

  I was properly upset about it, too. The kind of upset you get when you’re in the minority – because when Tony and Rob heard it they loved it as well, so it was fait accompli, mate. That was the end of it.

  For me it was almost like the An Ideal for Living moment, when I got the record home and put it on only to hear that it was absolutely shit. Unknown Pleasures sort of had the same effect. To make us sound so . . . weedy. It made me feel sick. Oh my God, he’s taken all the guts out of it. All the balls. How could he do that?

  Now, of course, I can see the error of my ways. Now I can see that what Martin gave us, which was the greatest gift any producer can give any band. He gave us timelessness. Because Unknown Pleasures is just one of those things: it’s a truly ageless album. Think of the millions of albums influenced by Unknown Pleasures that have aged, while Unknown Pleasures hasn’t. That was his gift to us. We gave him the brilliant songs and he put them in little capsules so they�
��d stay brilliant forever.

  Bernard had of course done a great job on the An Ideal for Living cover. And I’m not being sarcastic: I really think he did. He was always on the lookout for images to put on our stuff; and looking through a book, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy, he saw a diagram of a pulsar, showed it to Peter Saville and that was it. Bernard doesn’t get nearly enough credit for that, because he couldn’t have made a better choice: that image is now forever associated with Joy Division and Unknown Pleasures the record. Talking of which, I can’t remember who came up with the title. Ian again? Either way Peter went off, applied his magic and turned it into Unknown Pleasures, putting all his great little touches on it: the textured paper, the text on the reverse and the light and shade of having the outer sleeve black and the inner sleeve white. To be honest, I wasn’t that interested in the art. I was just pleased that they didn’t intend to feature the band. We’d seen too many punk bands standing there scowling in black and white, their name sprayed on the wall behind them. We were all behind playing down the personality. Our image was a kind of anti-image, about anonymity and being chilly and grey and buttoned-up against the cold. In lots of our pictures we’re hunched up or have our backs turned, which was a mixture of being cold and not giving a fuck about the whole business of image, really. We didn’t want it to be about us. We certainly didn’t want it to be about our looks, ‘cause we were such a bunch of ugly bastards. We wanted it all to be about the music.

  It was the same with journalists. Right from the early days Rob had been dead against us giving interviews – especially me and Bernard, because we just used to sit there and say stupid things. Taking the piss.

  Rob’s response was, ‘Right, you two. You don’t speak. At all. Just sit there and look menacing.’ He didn’t do it to create a mystique around the band but because he thought we were a couple of cretins. The result was that it created a mystique around the band. Absolute genius.