Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook

  All of which didn’t bode well because we were due to record our second album with him, a prospect we might well have been dreading but for the fact that we were going to London to record it, in Britannia Row studios, owned by Pink Floyd, just like proper rock stars.

  Our families didn’t like it, of course. We got a lot of grief: ‘Why can’t you just record at Strawberry?’

  I think Rob liked the idea of getting Ian away for a bit and of course Ian loved it because he got to shack up with Annik. Martin wanted to use Britannia Row because it was state of the art at that time and he did like his toys. Chris Nagle got the elbow, though. Martin wanted to use this other guy he’d met, John Caffery, who wasn’t wildly imaginative but was a nice bloke, while the tape operator was Mike Johnson, who later became New Order’s engineer on everything we ever did. We liked him and really got on with him; he was very imaginative and willing to try anything.

  So we decamped to London, where Rob had hired two flats above a shop, which were opposite each other across a corridor, both two-bedroom. They were probably quite small but they seemed huge to us at the time, with open-plan kitchens and everything. Ian and Bernard had one side – with Annik in with Ian when she stayed over – while me Steve and Rob had the other side. Our flat wasn’t as cosy – it was a bit bigger, colder and more sparsely furnished – but was still okay.

  Martin was in a hotel because he wanted to be as far away from us as possible because he thought we were pricks – and how right he was.

  Then there was Brittannia Row itself. The studios we’d used in Manchester were a bit old fashioned. All wood-panelling and heavy drapes and cork tiles on the walls. Britannia Row was like something out of Star Wars in comparison. It was a bit more austere and clinical than anywhere we’d been at home. It had an enclosed spaceship atmosphere, with the control room in particular really packed full of stuff. There wasn’t much room for anybody else; we had a bench seat against the wall. Me and Bernard would position ourselves one either side of Martin, looking over his shoulder.

  He was in his element there, Martin was. He loved the airless quality of Britannia Row. He loved how it felt sealed off from the outside world and started working at night to take advantage of it at its most silent and dead. Listen to the finished product and you can hear all of that in the album.

  There were offices, too, so loads of staff hanging around – Pink Floyd’s staff, I think – and there was a PA company based there, plus they had a recreation room with a pool table in it. Islington was a very interesting area. There was a famous taxidermy shop called Get Stuffed full of very exotic animals and a military shop on the corner where I used to stand staring in at the window, looking at these really expensive World War II flying jackets, lusting after them.

  Every day we’d clamber into Steve’s car and drive the few miles from York Street to Islington, Martin arriving in his old beat-up Volvo. He’d ripped the speakers out and replaced them with two Auratone monitor speakers, studio speakers that are very flat but faithful. Martin said if we could make the mix sound good on the Auratones then it would sound good on anything. Nobody in their right mind would listen to Auratones for pleasure because they sound rotten; they soak up all the reflections and echo and wetness on a track, make everything sound dead dry and boring. But that was Martin’s scheme: make the record sound good on them and it’ll lop your head off on a set of decent speakers. Listening to a mix with him meant getting in his car and having him drive you around while you checked out how it sounded. He hadn’t bothered screwing them down, these speakers, so they just used to roll around the floor of the Volvo, and because Martin was such a terrible driver they did a lot of rolling around.

  But of course we weren’t using him for his skill as a driver. As a producer he was getting the best out of us, and at the same time we were learning from him. It was him who encouraged us to use the piano; they had a grand piano at Brittannia Row. He put it on ‘The Eternal’, trying it on nearly every track. He showed Bernard how to use keyboards properly, how to layer them to give the sound a real richness and depth. Christ, he used to get pissed off with us, especially me and Barney: we were about as welcome as a dog at a game of skittles.

  ‘Oh, Martin, what do you reckon about making the high hat a bit brighter?’ one of us would say, strictly taking turns.

  He’d scream at us. ‘Fucking shut up, you pair of twats.’

  I’ve since discovered that Martin was on heroin then, and that one night he drove to Manchester and back to score, he was that desperate for it. But to be honest there was no evidence of that in the studio. He was smoking a lot of dope, as he always did, but otherwise really efficient and really creative. He introduced us to the ARP synthesizers and sequencers, which he and Bernard used a lot, and to audio gates, used so that the drums would trigger synthesizer sounds and sound really crisp and powerful.

  Martin’s big thing was still clarity. He always said that for a recording to have lasting effect and impact it had to have clarity and separation. Now, remember: me and Barney still didn’t like the sound of Unknown Pleasures. I mean, I suppose that by then we’d grudgingly accepted that it was a great album, and knew that part of that was down to the work Martin had done, but it still wasn’t how we heard Joy Division. We wanted a harder, harsher more metallic sound, like a group playing in a garage with metal walls, like the Stooges or Velvet Underground. He wanted us to sound like – how did he describe it? – adult gothic music or something.

  Well, he was right and we were wrong. Sorry, Martin, if you’re up there. But it didn’t stop us bitching at the time because he’d make us play the song then take it apart.

  ‘Right, let’s concentrate on this bit,’ he’d say, and would do a lot of work adding effects and synth parts. He spent many a happy hour messing about with the synths and the sequencers, too – much to the studio manager’s delight, because it was an expensive studio, Britannia Row, around £40 an hour; considering I was only earning £12 a week, this was an absolute fortune.

  So workwise it was great. As far as socializing went, this was when a division appeared in the band. The first, I suppose you’d have to say. It was caused by Ian finding his arty feet and us not handling this all that well.

  By finding his arty feet I mean behaving a little bit pretentiously. There were other influences in his life now and he was soaking them up. One of these was Genesis P-Orridge out of Throbbing Gristle. Now I like Genesis, and I fucking love Throbbing Gristle, but I can’t get on with the whole none-more-arty attitude that goes with that scene. Genesis wrote the book on all that.

  Then of course there was Annik. Although she had her flat in Parson’s Green she and Ian had set up house in his room in the flat across the way and were acting like a right pair of arty Bohemian types. Every five minutes they’d be announcing that they were off to some art exhibition or some gallery, with their noses in the air, making it perfectly clear that whatever they were doing wasn’t for the likes of us.

  The fact that in return we gave it loads and called him all sorts of pretentious tossers wasn’t very nice of us, of course. If I’m honest, we were pretty horrible to him about it. So what if he wanted to go to an art gallery with his new beau? It was really none of our business.

  But you know what it’s like. Young lads, their mate suddenly going off with his new girlfriend, taking on airs and graces: they rip the piss. I’ve no doubt that the likes of Genesis and Annik thought they knew the ‘real’ Ian, and that he was most at home in ‘their’ world. But we thought we knew the ‘real’ Ian. Probably Debbie did, too. What I’ve realized in the years since is that the truth was a lot more complex and in-between than any of us really knew at the time. Thinking about it, I bet even Ian didn’t know who the ‘real’ Ian was.

  About halfway through the recording Rob announced that we should get our other halves down, and sent them money for train tickets. Debbie didn’t come, much to Ian’s relief. She used the money to pay a bill. I can’t remember the sequence of event
s, but that’s because it was a day best forgotten. For a start, we left them waiting around at the station for a couple of hours. Then they had to hang around while we finished in the studio, which didn’t exactly improve the mood. Later I accidentally blabbed to Iris about Annik being with Ian all of the time. Me and my big mouth. She kicked off, which added to the general air of gloom. She then told Lesley.

  In short, the day was a complete debacle, because it was really expensive and everybody was as miserable as sin and I don’t even know why that day was chosen, because we were in the studio anyway, which didn’t help matters. So you had Sue, Lesley, Gillian and Iris all twiddling their thumbs, dead fucking pissed off at being dragged to London only to have to sit around, and fuming that they were apparently banned from the whole process while Annik was hanging around.

  We breathed a big sigh of relief when it was all was over, I can tell you, and Rob celebrated by putting cornflakes in everybody’s bed. However, in order to escape suspicion, he put them in his own bed as well and was walking around scratching his head, going, ‘Well if we’ve all got cornflakes in our beds, then who’s fucking done it, then?’

  A few days later the truth emerged and we were like, ‘You barmy bastard. What’s the point in japing yourself?’

  Another night we overheard Ian and Annik getting ready go out, and Annik saying, ‘Ian, Ian, hurry and do the i-ron-ing.’ Just like that. ‘I-ron-ing’. And there stood Ian, all done up ready to go out, doing Annik’s ironing with a fag hanging out of his mouth.

  We were like, ‘I-ron-ing. I-an, have you done the i-ron-ing?’ which really pissed him off and he got really angry. Me and Barney noticed that they had a teddy bear in the eiderdown in their room and laid into him about that, too.

  He was like, ‘Fuck off, you pair of twats. Just fuck off and leave us alone, would you?’

  I feel terrible about it now, of course. Now I’m older and wiser, and now I’ve looked at his lyrics and worked out what a tortured soul he was. We should have left him alone to have his love affair but we didn’t because he wasn’t tragic Ian Curtis the genius then. He was just our mate and that’s what you did with your mates up North: you ripped the piss out of them.

  One particular evening we got back before Ian and Annik, who were still out somewhere, probably at a gallery or an exhibition or something, and Barney said, ‘Come on, let’s jape their room.’

  So we went in and the first thing we did – what a bunch of bastards – we took out the bed. No mean feat. Then we unfolded the i-ron-ing board, made the bed over the i-ron-ing board and tucked the teddy in the top. We hid in Barney’s room, looking through the keyhole waiting for them to come back. Didn’t have long to wait. A few minutes later the front door opened and Ian and Annik came into the flat and then went into the bedroom.

  Next thing you know, she screamed. ‘Ian, Ian, what have zey done to our room?’ We pissed ourselves laughing. Then Ian kicked off. Really kicked off. Shit. He heard us laughing from the other side of Barney’s door and launched himself at the door, screaming, ‘You fucking cunts, you fucking bunch of twats,’ kicking hell out of the door.

  We weren’t laughing any more. We were scared, because let me tell you, he was going mental. Absolutely mental. What if he had a fit? What if he smashed the door in?

  He calmed down enough for us to make our escape. But of course we still had their bed, which was in bits in the other flat. As we scarpered across there we had Annik on our tails and she launched herself at the door.

  ‘You peegs,’ she was screaming. ‘You fooking English peegs.’ Kicking the glass window in the door.

  Of course we were in fits again, which just made it worse. God knows how we got the bed back together.

  Part of the problem was that we were jealous of Ian, I think. Annik was fit and exotic, and Ian was living with her in the flat while we were all slumming it. Or that’s how it felt anyway.

  Plus he was Martin’s favourite. As far back as Unknown Pleasures Ian had developed a special relationship with Martin – the two of them seemed to feed off each other creatively – and I think we sort of resented that, too, like Ian was the teacher’s pet or something. Especially as Martin treated the rest of us like shit.

  Ian would say to Martin, ‘Do you need me for a while, Martin?’

  Martin would say, ‘No, mate, you’re all right; come back at eight.’

  So Ian and Annik would happily go off together, whereas me and Barney were always ‘that pair of bastards’. We’d play the tracks with Steve and Ian would do a guide vocal but then he’d return to record the proper vocals at night, when it was quieter in the studio. Which is fair enough – it’s a normal thing to do – but it did create a bit of a them-and-us situation.

  It went both ways, of course. It’s a well known fact that we totally pissed him off during the making of Closer because he wrote a letter to someone – Rob, I think – saying that he wasn’t happy with the album, partly because of us lot, ‘sneaky, japing tossers’, he called us. But in his letters to Annik he says he was very happy with the album: strange.

  You’ve got to say he had a point. I remember being in the flat one night and A Certain Ratio were round having a smoke with Rob. Me and Barney didn’t bother with all that so Barney was going, ‘What shall we do to them? Come on, we got to do something . . .’

  So they’re all sitting there, squinting at us through clouds of dope smoke, going, ‘What are you up to, lads?’ as we set about our plan. First we smeared their minibus handles and windscreen in jam and marmalade, and tied toilet rolls to their exhaust; then we prepared eggs and pots and pans full of water.

  When ACR finally made their way out we were waving goodbye to them from the flat windows, watching as they got to the bus and found the jammy traps. Next thing we were pelting them with water and eggs and killing ourselves as we watched them trying and failing to wrench open the doors and get out of the line of fire. Finally they managed it and tore away, with two long trails of pink bog paper hanging off the back off the bus.

  So Ian had a point. We were sneaky, japing tossers. Not long before he would have been a part of it too. So if we resented him for being Martin’s favourite and having a fit foreign girlfriend, well, maybe we also thought, We’re losing our mate here.

  His illness hung over us, though. One night we were in the studio. He was working on his vocals and he seemed a bit rattled about something and went off by himself. We were waiting for him to do a vocal and after a while Martin was going, ‘Where is Ian? Where the fuck is Ian? Hooky, go and find out where Ian is and drag him back here.’

  So off I trotted and found him in the toilet, where he was sparkled on the floor, big gash in his head. He’d gone to the toilet, had a fit, fallen forward and banged his head on the sink, which had knocked him out.

  Guess what? We brought him round, he said he was all right and we carried on. I should call the book that, shouldn’t I? He Said He Was All Right So We Carried On.

  The other thing I remember is recording one afternoon and a bloke calling in to reception to see Martin. There was a group with him, a young group. They wanted to talk about Martin producing their first single.

  So Martin went off to talk and of course, being nosy, I poked my head around the door to get a look at these kids, who it turned out were called U2. I don’t know if it had been raining outside but they looked like something the cat had dragged in, and they were sitting in reception staring at Martin with complete awe. Very funny.

  They were huge fans of Joy Division, it turned out, and wanted Martin to produce their first single, ‘11 O’Clock Tick Tock’, which he did.

  Years later I got the shock of my life when Tony told me one story about Bono. It seems that after Ian had died Tony met Bono somewhere, and Bono was telling Tony not to worry because he would take over from where Ian left off.

  Ver y strange. But nice . . . Well, he did in a way, didn’t he? We may have been laughing at them in reception that day, the star-struck young pretenders, b
ut just look at how our two careers went. Seven years later we’d been stung with a tax bill for nearly a million quid and losing all our money on a nightclub, while they’d gone off and made The Joshua Tree, become the biggest band in the world and hadn’t opened a nightclub. And we all know how they feel about tax. They did everything right, in other words.

  For the cover of Closer, as well as the twelve-inch of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, Peter Saville showed the band a series of photographs taken by Bernard Pierre Wolff of crypts in Genoa’s Staglieno Cemetery. Of course, these images would later take on an extra, tragic significance.

  ‘I guess it worked for Ian,’ said Saville. ‘Perhaps if I’d been sent a draft of the lyrics, and had any kind of sensitivity, I might have thought, I’m not going to indulge that route. Let’s have some trees . . .’

  The ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ single cover was done before Closer. We went to Peter’s studio in Portobello Road. He’d just seen an article about a photographer who’d taken some photographs of a cemetery on the outskirts of Genoa that was used by rich Italian merchants. These rich families had got into a macabre competition with the tombs, each building more and more elaborate monuments.

  I loved the images and I loved Peter’s cover. I was always fascinated by the way the apostrophes both go the same way. They don’t frame the word Closer as you expect them to. I did ask him recently what that was all about, and it turns out that what I thought were apostrophes are actually full stops from the second century BC, and the reason they go that way is to do with the angle the original stone mason leaned when he was tapping out the words and punctuation marks. So there you go.

  It’s a beautiful cover. We all loved the pictures, especially Ian. I wonder: when he chose them did he realize how symbolic they would be? I don’t know; nobody does, I suppose. In my gut I think not but I do think that he saw them and saw how they fitted perfectly with the music on the album – which itself was a kind of soundtrack to his suffering, I guess. Quite shocking really. By the time we chose those pictures he had less than two months to live.