Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook

  Which wasn’t strictly speaking true, of course. Ian’s medication meant that fucking anybody was out of the question; and, like I say, it’s public knowledge that he and Annik never – what’s a nice way of saying it? – consummated their relationship. Even so, what Rob said was close enough to the bone to shut Annik up and she agreed that we could go in, which we did, only to discover that it was indeed a brothel. Everything was neon and there were neon strips everywhere – under the tables, which looked really good. (Come to think of it, I’ll have it to suggest that to Becky for our house.) And in every room there was a speaker under the bed, so that when music was playing it vibrated (but I won’t suggest that).

  Oh, and there was hot water and a mattress. The fourth date of the tour and it was the first time I’d had a proper mattress. Fucking luxury.

  Annik still didn’t like it, though. She and Ian ended up with the promoter at his house and when we all met up the next morning there was, shall we say, an atmosphere in the van.

  Things took a weird turn the next night, after the gig in Cologne, when this guy gave one of our entourage – all right, you’ve twisted my arm, it was Steve – a tab of acid. A ‘red star’, this guy called it. I think he’d got the idea from an interview that Steve was into hallucinogenics – which obviously wasn’t that far from the truth, because Steve said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and swallowed it.

  At which point the Dutch guy’s eyes widened and he went, ‘Oh my God, you Mancunians are wild.’

  ‘What do you mean,’ said Steve. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ve just taken five hits of acid in one go. You’re supposed to break a corner off to take it.’ And the guy walked off shaking his head at how wild we Mancunians were, while Steve sort of looked around at us, the colour draining from his face.

  To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, we were at the promoter’s house when the drugs began to take hold.

  It had a mezzanine section, this house, where we were all sleeping. You got to it by climbing up a ladder, and Steve was getting more and more fucked by the second. Barney could see the writing was on the wall, grabbed his sleeping bag and escaped down the ladder. Which left me, Twinny and Steve, who by now was a proper space cadet and was starting to talk about how he was going to get an axe and chop me and Twinny into little bits.

  Twinny, you’ll recall, is easily spooked at the best of times, so the next thing you know he’d fucked off as well – except that because he was so freaked out by all the talk of Steve chopping us up with an axe he moved the ladder so Steve couldn’t get down into the main bit of the house. But then again neither could I.

  It was the beginning of a very long night. Stuck alone with Steve, who had reached a kind of zoned-out, off-in-another-world stage of this trip, I’d nod off and every time I woke up he’d be staring intently at me and I’d go, ‘Fuck off, Steve. Stop staring.’

  He was still spaced out the next morning. Much to our relief he was okay to play, but he didn’t speak – not a word for three days – which was quite weird. We’d be in the bus and you’d look and Steve would be staring at you.

  Then the next time you looked he’d be staring at Barney and it would be Barney’s turn to feel uncomfortable. Thank God there was no axe available, that’s all I can say.

  Still I wasn’t eating. By the time we reached Rotterdam I could have eaten the hind legs off a rotten donkey, I was that hungry, and it was bloody Chinese again. They’d taken us to a Chinese restaurant, where I sat feeling sorry for myself until this waitress who spoke really good English came over to ask why I wasn’t eating.

  I was a right little kid, going, ‘I can’t eat it. I don’t like it. Me mam says it’s dirty.’

  Evidently she was taking pity on me and said, ‘What can you eat?’

  ‘English food.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That’s a shame because we only have Dutch food – steak and chips, egg and chips, sausage and chips.’

  Oh God, it was like I’d died and gone to heaven. My deep affinity with the Dutch began that night as I ate like a lord – two steaks, two full dinners. It was brilliant. It was all my mother’s fault, of course. That’s how deep the indoctrination went. Even though all the rest would be tucking greedily into their Chinese and somehow managing not to fall down dead, and despite the fact that I was fucking starving, I still couldn’t accept the evidence of my own eyes and eat some special fried rice or whatever. When I did – I must have been at death’s door to do it, but I eventually did – it tasted incredible. I loved it. I was like, ‘Mother . . . !’

  The same thing happened years later with New Order, when we went for a meal with Cabaret Voltaire. There I was, heart sinking as we pushed open the door to a Sheffield curry house, knowing I was going to have to order whatever was the one dish they had for unadventurous bastards like me: Maryland Chicken, which tasted like they hated making it. One of the Cabs had this amazing-smelling curry.

  ‘Can I have a taste?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, course . . .’

  It was delicious. Fabulous.

  ‘Mother . . . !’

  But that moment in Holland ended up being among the best of the tour. It was funny, though, because then more than ever – because of the discomfort, probably – we played some of our best gigs. We always loved playing so much and during that tour in particular it felt like the only refuge – from the cold, the hunger, Annik’s clucking, the band bickering – was being on stage. We’d play and be brilliant and really click as musicians, then come off stage and immediately resume our former positions at each other’s throats.

  What was at the root of it all, I’m not sure. Definitely we felt a bit frustrated that, with our album doing so well (it had featured in a load of best-of-year lists from 1979), and us being such a hot band, we could still be so cold, freezing in a minibus and on people’s floors. I’ll tell you this for nothing: I’ve never been so happy to return to Manchester as I was when we got back.

  ‘We carried on’

  We played a lot with Killing Joke around that time. They were a tough bunch to work with but we became friends, and years later they were the only group ever to ask me to join them. Primal Scream almost did, just changing their minds right at the end: they were worried they’d sound too much like New Order. Anyway, Killing Joke got back together after a long time apart to make an album, Pandemonium, but their bassist Youth was getting into production and didn’t want to tour, so I got the call: did I want to play bass on tour with Killing Joke?

  Because New Order had split up, and I’d finished doing Revenge, I was at a bit of a loose end; so I decided that at the very least I could listen to the album they wanted me to play. Plus the wages they were offering were very good: a grand per gig. Per gig.

  We were actually working together on a German concept album, Freispiel, in Cologne’s Stadgarten Studio, it was a collaboration of rock and avant-garde musicians. We worked with Rüdiger Elze (guitar) and Rüdiger Braune (drums) both from the group Kowalski. Afterwards I ended up back at the lads’ hotel. I was drinking then, and doing whatever else was going round – and there was plenty of it going round that night.

  In the room were me, Geordie and Jaz and two girls. We all sat down to listen to their new album and when it was over they stopped, looked at me and said, ‘Well? What do you think?’ Now, because I was completely off my tits, I said, ‘I can’t play that shit.’

  But I didn’t mean like ‘shit’, like the music was shit. I meant shit, as in ‘that shit’, meaning the bass, which was the normal, low-end, chord-following rumble, which is just not what I do; I don’t play bass like that. I can’t play bass like that. Not that the album was shit. Far from it. Just that I don’t play ‘that shit’.

  Being off my face, though, I couldn’t get this point across. But Geordie and Jaz were just as wasted as I was, and they weren’t getting it either. They thought I was talking about the album. I wasn’t.

  The more I tried to dig myself out of it, the worse it went, until the atmo
sphere had become really heated and we were getting to our feet. If it wasn’t for the girls breaking it up we’d have ended up fighting there and then – and they would have kicked the shit out of me. Meaning ‘the shit’.

  Anyway the situation was defused thanks to the feminine intervention and a couple of weeks later I was surprised to find that the offer still stood. By this time I was thinking that a grand a gig was simply too good an offer to pass up. Fuck it, I’ll follow chords for a grand a gig. So I decided to swallow my pride and play that shit. I got my head round it, too, and was starting to look forward to being on the road with Killing Joke. Then I spoke to either Jaz or Geordie and they said that Youth had changed his mind: couldn’t bear to have someone else playing his bass lines, apparently. Yeah, me, I know . . .

  Anyway, as a result of all that me, Jaz and Geordie decided to do a bit of work as a side-project, and we put six or eight tracks together. We even had meetings with their management, E.G., about setting up a band together. Never got as far as a name, but we were thinking about who we were going to have drumming for us, and I’d even persuaded Jaz that he should do more singing, rather than his normal, more shouty style, when suddenly it all went quiet. Never heard from them, never got a postcard, a phone call whatever – complete media blackout. Until one day I started getting PRS on a weird song that I’d never heard of and didn’t remember playing on and it was a Killing Joke song. They’d used me on one of their albums, the cheeky buggers. Saying that, I do hold Jaz and Geordie in the absolute highest regard; not being in a band with them is one of my only regrets in music.

  So that was that. They always were a right bunch, though, to be honest, and they’d be jockeying for position on the bill all the time. They were very ambitious and driven; ruthless. I mean, that night at the ULU, they were trying to fuck things up for us. They were trying the old Fast Breeder trick of being the support but going on late so it looked like they were the headliners. Meanwhile we were having trouble with another support group, from Manchester, called the Smirks, who were aptly named because they were a right bunch of arrogant smirkers. That almost ended in fisticuffs too.

  Plus my bass amp blew up while were sound-checking. Of course in those days you didn’t have somebody who would come and fix your gear. You didn’t have a ‘guitar roadie’. And you didn’t carry spares. What you did was get your manager to ask the support group if you could borrow their amp. Oh, but our support were Killing fucking Joke and the Smirks, and Killing Joke were doing their level best to fuck us right up with all their time-keeping shenanigans, and I’d almost had a fight with the Smurfs, so of course they both refused to help.

  It was quite funny, really: because I’d done so badly at school I knew nothing about electronics when I joined the band, and when I had to fix the gear I did wish I’d paid more attention in physics. But there I was – I had to take the whole cab apart, hundreds of screws, check the wiring, which was okay. Shit, one of the speakers had blown.

  As I was doing that Killing Joke came on. I was stuffed in the back of the cab, with the Joke sound-checking more loudly than usual, it seemed, me holding a soldering iron and trying to see with a fag lighter. I ended up rewiring the cab and managed to get through the gig. Fuck me, that was traumatic.

  Not quite as traumatic as what happened next, though, because it was around this time that Ian started cutting himself up.

  After getting back from the European tour he’d apparently downed a bottle of Pernod and slashed himself with a knife – a fucking kitchen knife. We talked to him about it in practice afterwards.

  ‘What the fuck did you do that for, Ian, you daft bastard?’

  ‘Oh, it was just one of those things,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I got pissed and got carried away. You know . . .’

  ‘Yeah, yeah . . .’

  But, actually, no. I didn’t know.

  Of course – you know what I’m going to say. We brushed off the fact that he’d added self-harming to the list. We avoided the subject. We carried on like everything was all right and pretended that Ian wasn’t ill, wasn’t struggling with the responsibility of the band and didn’t have some heavy, heavy affairs-of-the-heart stuff to contend with. We carried on. With Ian’s blessing we carried on; Ian, who out of all of us most wanted us to taste the fruits of success and didn’t want his illness to get in the way; Ian, who always buoyed us up after a bad review or a shit show. Who, even though he was the frontman and the focal point, always insisted that we were a group, who used to say, ‘All I do is the words and sing. The others do the music.’

  Because that’s the thing, and I can’t say it enough: nobody wanted the group – the whole group – to do well more than Ian did. So he lied. Either to us, or to himself, or both. He lied when he said that it was no big deal to get pissed and start carving away at yourself with a knife.

  He was fitting more frequently, too. He’d fit at gigs. There was one when he just froze, mid-strum on his guitar. Another one when he fell into the drum kit and was thrashing around; Steve played on as Ian kicked his drums out from beneath him and Twinny and Terry rushed on to haul him off the stage. Another where he kicked the flight-case the synthesizer was on and sent it spinning off the stage. More than anything Ian hated having a fit on stage and I can see why. Being at your most vulnerable, just flipping out like that, with some of the audience laughing, some scared, some cheering, some thinking you’re a freak. It must have been horrible. But we’d stop him swallowing his tongue and he’d get up, tell us he was fine and, well, you know the rest.

  It got so that recording our next album was almost a break. Almost.

  ‘He thought we were pricks – and how right he was’

  By now plans were being made to tour America, and Joy Division were due to record their second album at Britannia Row studios in London. Things were going less smoothly for Ian Curtis, however. During a confrontation in which Debbie smashed his copy of Bowie’s Low, he admitted his affair with Annik. Despite assuring Debbie that he would break it off, he didn’t, and continued writing to Annik, his letters to her reflecting his inner turmoil. He told her about the obligations and responsibilities that weighed heavily upon him; that his epilepsy seemed to be worsening, the attacks growing more frequent and more intense; and that his dog, Candy, was to be sent away. Finding it increasingly difficult to cope with Candy during Ian’s absence, not to mention the cost, and with Ian unwilling to either contribute or discuss the issue, Debbie felt she had no choice and had made arrangements for the dog to live on a farm in Rochdale. Ian, meanwhile, was taking barbiturates for his epilepsy, which have a numbing, deadening effect.

  Next the band decamped to London for the recording sessions, leaving Terry Mason and Twinny at home and using Dave Pils as a roadie. He stayed at home in Walthamstow, Martin Hannett in a hotel, while Rob Gretton and the band rented two flats in York Street. The cost of this, however, meant that band members had very little to live on.

  We had enough to get some food and maybe a pint, the usual. Both Sue and Iris worked, so at least me and Barney didn’t have to worry about providing, but Ian had a wife and kid back home, so, just like everything else in this story, it was harder for him.

  It’s funny really, when you look at it like that, because nowadays if we’d released an album like Unknown Pleasures we’d have been nominated for the Mercury, be swanning around Glastonbury fighting off mates of Kate Moss and sitting on sofas with Fearne Cotton. Back then things moved much more slowly. Independent music stayed underground. Ian on the cover of the NME was as big as it got. We never felt like we were stars at all, and we never acted like it.

  For a start we didn’t have any money, hadn’t really earned any yet. We let Rob take care of all of that and he did it very well, keeping it all close to his chest. One of Tony’s favourite sayings was: ‘Always keep your bands poor. That way they make great music.’ He may well have been right. There’s nothing like sudden fame and wealth to turn a band’s heads.

  But just every now and
then it would have been nice to have tested his theory instead of being forced to prove it.

  It made us a better band, though. I mean, Rob, you’d have to say, was very good at keeping you grounded, making sure your feet stayed firmly on the ground. His thing was: just get on with it, play live and record. That was how we went in to record Closer. We were keen to do an album as good as Unknown Pleasures but it wasn’t like there was huge pressure – not from Rob and not from Factory. All the pressure we felt came from within and we were brimming with confidence back then. Ian’s illness was the only black spot on the horizon. Otherwise we were rocking.

  By that time we’d already recorded ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ at Pennine but weren’t happy with it so had another crack in Strawberry. Martin was up to his old tricks. He’d stay up till two in the morning then phone Rob and go, ‘Right, I’m going in the studio now with Chris to mix “Love Will Tear us Apart”,’ and Rob would phone me up and go, ‘You’re nearest: fucking get down to Strawberry now, Hooky; they’re mixing,’ and I’d go, ‘Fucking hell, it’s two in the morning.’

  He’d just say, ‘Fucking get down there.’ Because he didn’t have a car, you see. So I’d drive to the studio at half-two in the morning, buzzing the buzzer for hours before they’d let me in, and Martin would say, ‘Oh, you turned up, did you?’

  ‘Yes, why are you doing it now?’

  ‘Oh, it’s the only time we could get.’ But it wasn’t – it was just so you weren’t there, so you didn’t turn up. Because one of the most famous things about Martin was that he hated having the musicians around during the mix, so he’d make it really difficult. The night he did ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ the air conditioning was cranked up as usual. I was freezing while Martin and Chris sniggered. He may well have been a genius, Martin, but that didn’t stop him being a right twat sometimes.