Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook

  We made it. Just. Left behind our wreckage and travelled on to Edinburgh, all of us except Steve nursing terrible hangovers and me wondering about my arm sticking out of the bed like that – and this is the funny thing, because ever since that night I’ve always had to sleep with one arm hanging out of the bed.

  We kept our noses clean until we got to Dundee, where we decided that Twinny was getting too big for his boots, because he was always sniding off with the Buzzcocks, so we decided to jape his room.

  First order of business was to get all his clothes and tie them to a flagpole outside the hotel. Then we took the bed out of his room and replaced it with a baby’s cot we found in the corridor and then, because Twinny’s dead superstitious, we took out all the light bulbs, tied a bit string around the coat hangers in his room and fed it through the connecting door, where we waited, giggling.

  And waited. Five o’clock in the morning, when Twinny finally got back to his room, pissed as a fart, and we’d long since stopped giggling. But still, we felt extra justified now that he’d spent all night living it up with the Buzzcocks again! So when he got into the room and we heard him flicking the light switch to no avail, we started rattling the coat hangers. He freaked. Shouted something about the room being haunted and tried to escape. But because he was pissed and the room was pitch black he fell over, right into the cot, which smashed to pieces.

  He passed out and the next morning was furious, demanding we give him his clothes. We just pointed him in the direction of the flagpole and told him it served him right.

  ‘Turned out to be horse meat’

  We had a break from the Buzzcocks tour to do our next gig, which was at Plan K in Brussels, a big arty happening with a William Burroughs reading, screenings of films, Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire. We were almost late getting there because Terry was driving the van. The thing was, Terry, Twinny and Dave Pils got on really badly sometimes, always bickering, and it was only me that kept them from battering each other. But now that we were a proper professional band with paid road crew (i.e., them) I didn’t drive the van any more so I didn’t travel with the crew; I went in Steve’s Cortina. Luxury. But it did mean that the Three Stooges didn’t have anyone to keep them apart; and on the day we left for Brussels they must have had some massive fall-out, because Terry was in a bad mood, and because he was in a bad mood he was driving at Miss Daisy speeds down the motorway and kept pulling over. Never the most competent of drivers, he was telling me that he couldn’t get the van to go over thirty miles an hour and I ended up replacing him in the driving seat and flooring it down the motorway rather than risk missing the ferry. I got it up to eighty, though, and we made it to Brussels, which was dead exciting – the first time we’d travelled outside the UK.

  Somehow we found Michel Duval, the organizer, who took us to the hotel and we were buzzing – even more so at the thought of the luxurious Brussels hotel he was bound to have chosen for us.

  Except when we got there it wasn’t a hotel. It wasn’t even a B&B. It was a youth hostel. Instead of having rooms with two sharing, which is what we were used to, we had to sleep in this huge dormitory. We grabbed the best beds. Steve, being too slow, got one with a big lump in it where the springs had broken and when he lay on it he was all bent over; Barney was already complaining that he wouldn’t be able to get any kip, being such a light sleeper, even though it had never seemed to bother him before; while Ian took one look at the set-up and went off to try to wangle a bed elsewhere – which he did, with Cabaret Voltaire in their normal, nice room, before returning to rub our noses in it.

  With our sleeping arrangements sorted we went to the gig, which was at this huge, amazing ‘art’ space, I suppose you’d have to say. We did our bit and it was really good gig, and afterwards me, Ian and Barney went along to see William Burroughs then stood around as he sat at a table signing books.

  Ian was a bit awestruck, but poor, so he couldn’t afford to buy one of the books William Burroughs was signing. ‘I’m going over to ask him if I can have a book,’ he said, after standing there for ages looking over at the table like a kid eyeing up a plate of warm pies or something.

  Me and Barney thought this was hilarious. I mean, looking at William Burroughs, how grizzled and world-weary he looked, he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was in the habit of handing out freebies to oiks from Macclesfield. Still, Ian had sunk a couple of Duvels and was feeling brave and we were winding him up something rotten. So when there was a lull in visitors to William Burroughs’ table over he strolled over, ignoring us two, who went and hid behind a pillar nearby, sniggering.

  ‘Oh hello, Mr Burroughs,’ he said, ‘I’m a big fan of yours, and . . .’

  William Burroughs looked at him and growled. ‘Yeah, kid, yeah. Whatever.’

  He’d probably been hearing that all night – from people who were at least buying his books.

  ‘Well, I’m in the band Joy Division who played tonight . . .’

  ‘Yeah, kid, yeah. Whatever,’ growled William Burroughs.

  ‘Well, I was wondering if I could have a book?’

  ‘Have a book?’ snapped William Burroughs.

  ‘Yeah.’

  He looked at Ian. ‘Fuck off, kid,’ he said and Ian slunk away, tail between his legs, as we wet ourselves laughing. We then spent the rest of the night growling, ‘Fuck off, kid,’ at Ian – whose response was to get really, really pissed.

  He wasn’t the only one. Twinny: also absolutely pissed. I found him outside and instead of loading our gear into the back of the van he’d raided the bar and had stacked the van full of stolen beer. We made him put it all back so we could get the gear in, so we could return to the youth hostel. When we got there it was absolute carnage. Back in the dorm, Twinny discovered this Belgian guy asleep in his bed.

  ‘Oi, you, fuck off!’ he was shouting, just hollering at the bloke, who in return looked terrified, like a rabbit in the headlights. Twinny was advancing on him and would probably have grabbed the guy if I hadn’t stepped between them.

  ‘Twinny,’ I said, ‘he can’t understand you, y’daft bastard. He’s a Belgian. You’ll have to speak French to him.’

  Twinny looked at me, nodded, and went to the guy, ‘Oi, You. Fucky offy.’

  Poor bloke just got out of bed and legged it, by which time the lot of us were in absolute hysterics and there was no stopping us. Ian was laughing because he was going off for a good night’s kip in Cabaret Voltaire’s room and it was obvious that things in our dorm were only going to get more out of control. Barney was moaning about something then started having a fight with Twinny, but Twinny got carried away and upended Barney’s bed, with him on it, so Barney came flying off and hit his head on a radiator. That completely enraged him so he picked up a bottle of orange squash, smashed the end off on the radiator and poured it all over Twinny’s bed. Twinny’s response was to smash open two bottles of Duvel and pour them on Barney’s bed, by which point we were telling them both to calm the fuck down before someone got hurt. Just then Ian got his knob out and started pissing in our ashtray – one of those tall freestanding ashtrays, it was – thinking it was hilarious, looking back over his shoulder going, ‘Ha, you wankers, I’m pissing in your room! Ha ha, pissing in your room!’ It was one of those pisses that just seemed to go on and on forever, like a donkey’s, and we were calling him a dirty bastard when a caretaker walked into the room flanked by two security goons.

  The guy went berserk. Ian wasn’t smiling any more. He was trying to stuff his cock back into his trousers and at the same time pacify the caretaker, who was turning all shades of purple, calling Ian in French what we’d just been calling him in English, except that now Ian didn’t think it was at all funny.

  ‘I don’t understand French,’ he was saying. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand French. Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.’

  Whatever it was he did to calm the caretaker down, I don’t know, but he did, and the festivities continued and nex
t thing I passed out, one arm hanging out of the bed.

  Next morning we woke up in this wreckage of a dorm, with orange and Duvel and Ian’s piss everywhere, hungover to shit, desperately needing something to eat and ending up in what we thought was a burger bar. There we spent the last of our money on seven burgers, which they handed us to eat raw. Turned out be horse meat and of course none of us could eat it so we went hungry.

  Which served us all right, I suppose.

  That was our Belgium jaunt. On our return home we went straight back on tour with the Buzzcocks, but somewhere in the middle of all that madness we found time to record what would go on to become one of our best-known tracks, ‘Atmosphere’, which we did for Licht und Blindheit, a French-territory-only EP. Who puts one of their best songs on a limited-edition single available only in France? Us, that’s who.

  ‘Atmosphere’ is a massive song. A lot of people say it’s their favourite Joy Division song but it’s not mine; it reminds me too much of Ian, like it’s his death march or something, and it figures that it’s one of the most popular songs to play at funerals: Robbie Williams has got ‘Angels’ for weddings and we’ve got ‘Atmosphere’ for funerals. Becky says that when I die she’s going to play ‘Atmosphere’ at my funeral – but by Russ Abbott. Thanks, love.

  So no, ‘Atmosphere’ isn’t my favourite. If you were to ask me what was, it would have to be ‘Insight’. I mean, it might change tomorrow, but it’s ‘Insight’ right now because it’s just so simple but so powerful – and it doesn’t have a chorus. That was one of the things I really liked about Joy Division, that the songs didn’t have to have a chorus or a middle eight. I used to love it about New Order, too, until we started to get all formal about the writing, until by the end every song had a verse, chorus and middle eight, which to me just made everything bland.

  But ‘Insight’ doesn’t have all that. To me it’s the sound of a group of young musicians working out the possibilities of what they can do, and working them out together. Changing the world. It reminds me of a time when writing music was easy but most of all fun.

  The release of the ‘Transmission’ seven-inch in October had proved to be a disappointment for Tony Wilson, who had hoped that its chorus of ‘Dance, dance, dance to the radio’ would win it radio airplay. Plans to hire a radio plugger were shelved at the insistence of Rob Gretton and Martin Hannett, who felt that to promote the single went against the Factory ethos. As a result, and despite critical acclaim, just 3,000 of the 10,000 copies ordered by Wilson were sold. Rob Gretton was to orchestrate the band’s next act of commercial defiance, striking a deal with French label Sordide Sentimental. Set up in France in 1978 by Jean-Pierre Turmel and Yves Von Bontee, it had piqued his interest with a superbly packaged release of Throbbing Gristle’s ‘We Hate You (Little Girls)’, and a deal was made to release two Joy Division songs in similar fashion: ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Dead Souls’, produced by Martin Hannett during sessions at Cargo in October. Finally released in March 1980, The Licht und Blindheit EP was limited to just 1,578 copies, mail order only, with most fans having to content themselves with taping it from the John Peel programme.

  The tracks that Throbbing Gristle put out on Sordide Sentimental were never going anywhere else. I mean, they were harsh even by the standards of Throbbing Gristle. Whenever I put that EP on my cat used to run out of the room. Us? We put two of our best songs on it. On a limited edition that we never even got any money for. The run was 1,578 copies; I found out years later that 1578 was also the last date the French beat the English in a war.

  Having said that, it didn’t bother us at the time – this came during a period when we were continually writing great songs, so it didn’t seem like such a big deal, to be honest. And, looking at it in terms of the whole Joy Division story, well, it’s just ‘us’ isn’t it? That special attitude championed by Rob and accepted by Tony that was either total naivety, utter stupidity, incredible foresight or a weird mix of all three. I honestly don’t know. I mean, people said we were mad at the time – other bands and their managers, I mean. But Rob loved it. He loved being bloody-minded and contrary and he liked nothing better than winding up Tony.

  ‘Atmosphere’ was originally written in two halves. The bass and drums was one idea – me and Steve came up with it together. The vocals and the keyboards was another idea. We’d been working on them separately, just tinkering with them, really, then put them together and got the song that we called ‘Chance’, featuring our Woolies organ borrowed from Barney’s gran.

  It would be a few years yet before we got overdrawn at the riff bank. This was the time, after all, that we also wrote ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and ended up recording it for the first time as part of a second John Peel session in November. It was a song we’d written during rehearsals at TJ’s. I had the riff, Steve built the drum part and Ian mumbled some words then said he was going to go home and write some lyrics for it, which he did, using the bass riff as the melody for the chorus. But Christ, if he’d written that song about me I’d have been heartbroken. I’m not sure who it was written about. I never asked. But whoever it was deserves all of his money just for that.

  ‘He’s possessed by the devil, that twat’

  Still with the Buzzcocks tour, we were travelling further afield in the UK and Ian began having more fits. He had a really bad one in Bournemouth. He was so tired by the time we got there. We all were, of course – absolutely knackered – but the rest of us weren’t on heavy medication. We didn’t have a wife and a baby, and our affairs of the heart weren’t quite so complicated.

  After a gig in Guildford the night before, Rob had shaved the band’s hair with clippers. Ian, Bernard and Steve got sheared; only I got away with it. We were staying at a B&B where Bernard had to go and sleep in the bathroom to get away from Rob’s snoring – the start of a regular habit for him – there was a lot more booze involved and it was all a bit of a riot one way or another. The upshot being that by the time we reached Bournemouth we were shattered – especially Ian. Most of the seizures he had occurred towards the end of gigs but this one was near the beginning of the show, which we had to stop. It lasted about an hour and a half, with me and Rob taking turns holding him down in the dressing room; once again with me holding his tongue in his mouth to stop him swallowing it. Christ, it was scary.

  He came round and was looking at us, his eyes all glassy.

  ‘Ian,’ I said to him, ‘Can you hear me, mate? We’re going to have to get you to the hospital.’ He shook his head: he understood me all right but he didn’t want to go to the hospital. Never did; didn’t want to be a bother. That was him all over.

  ‘Look, Ian, mate; it’s not right; you’ve been fitting too long. We’re taking you whether you like it or not.’

  He was still dead reluctant to go and in a funny sort of way he was right. You take a guy who’s just had an epileptic fit to casualty and the nurse looks at you like you’ve just dropped in from Venus. And that’s exactly what happened when we’d bundled Ian into the car, got him to the nearest hospital and waited hours for our turn to be seen.

  They did at least have the good grace to take him into a consulting room, while we hung about in the waiting room. After a while he came out. A bit pale, bit downcast. Otherwise okay.

  ‘You all right, Ian?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m okay. Don’t worry about it.’

  He went back to the gig, where the Buzzcocks had only just come on, and there was no sign of Twinny anywhere. After searching for a while I found him in a cupboard, all curled up in a ball like he was hiding from something.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing in here?’ I said.

  ‘He’s possessed by the devil, that twat.’

  ‘Get up, you soft bastard,’ I said, dragging him out. ‘Stop fucking around. Go and see him. He’s back to normal now.’

  Whatever ‘normal’ was. For Ian ‘normal’ was getting hardly any rest, eating shit food, getting pissed, travelling all the time, driving from cit
y to city. The precise opposite of everything he should have been doing. I look back and keep seeing where we should have stopped. It’s the part of doing this book that’s the hardest. Writing it all down, I can pinpoint the moments where we should have said ‘enough is enough’ – because now they seem so obvious. But at the time he just carried on and so did we. Selfishness, stupidity, wilful ignorance and a refusal to accept what was going on right in front of our noses – we were all guilty of it, even Ian. Because this was what we’d worked and waited for. All that freezing in TJ’s and fighting with the Drones and feeling ignored and overlooked was paying off at last. I wish sometimes I could tell the younger me, ‘Slow down, mate, what’s the big hurry? You’ve got another thirty or forty years of this,’ knowing that the twenty-two-year-old me would curl his lip and tell the old me to fuck off, because when you’re twenty-two it feels like if you don’t seize the moment then it’ll be gone in a puff of smoke.

  Even so, I find it mind-boggling that someone didn’t slap Rob Gretton and the rest of us and drag Ian off home to bed. But nobody did. Things just got more and more manic. On the Buzzcocks tour the practical jokes continued. Unsuspecting victims would open doors and get wastepaper bins of rubbish or water dumped on their heads. Or they’d sit in chairs we’d balanced on Coke cans so they’d topple over.

  Of course there were times it got right out of hand. One night, around about the time of fireworks night, the whole lot of us – me, Terry, Dave Pils, Rob and Steve – burst in on Ian and Barney, who were with a couple of girls in a hotel room, Barney in one bed, Ian in the other. Dave lit a couple of bangers and threw them into the room, where one of them landed on Barney’s shirt and set it on fire.