11
FIRST SONGS
So now I had become a player of gigs and discovered that there was more to being in a band than the playing of concerts. There is the matter of the writing of songs to be played when you get there. Hooky and Bernard had learned to play (after a fashion) from a book, nobody had taught Ian how to sing and, OK, I’d had music and drum lessons but I thought they were shit and mostly wrong as they had nothing to do with rock, or music as I saw it. So I was always pretty much making it up as I went along.
So how do you write a song? Let me count the ways. There must be hundreds. How do you write a song when you can’t play very well? How do you learn anything? You rely on feeling and intuition. And that’s what we did.
One of the first songs we wrote after I joined was a stomper called ‘Living in the Ice Age’. This came from a desire to do something that was a bit like the Glitter Band’s ‘Rock ’n’ Roll’, which had an infectious drum riff. The Glitter Band were slightly over-endowed in the drummer dept, having two skin bashers – one more than is strictly necessary – but it looked cool and sounded great. (Of course, this was long before singer Gary Glitter was exposed as an evil pervert. Back then he was just an oddly bewigged chap with a permanently startled expression, who wore clothes that looked to have been fashioned from Bacofoil. All the danger signs were there – why didn’t we notice?)
I bashed out a Glitter Band drum approximation, only a lot faster; Hooky did a propulsive pulse on the bass that followed Bernard’s guitar riff; Ian shouted some stuff about the Ice Age he’d scribbled in his notebook. And in less than an hour we’d knocked off a masterpiece, easy as that.
The song’s inspiration (apart from the Glitter connection) seemed to come from indescribable ideas or feelings – listening to ‘White Light/White Heat’ gave you a certain feeling and if what we were playing gave you a similar feeling then that meant it was good. Well, that’s how it worked for me and I can only really speak for myself here. My only previous experience in the business of putting together an original tune had been back in the days of the Folk Band and that had been a song the guitarist had written. I just did my best to come up with some sympathetic sort of pattern. The trouble was as soon as he’d finished playing his song to me, I’d already forgotten how it started. No matter how many times we rehearsed it, I still couldn’t remember it with any certainty. Even when we went to record it, I was still foggy about when the parts were supposed to happen. I think the technical phrase for this is, appropriately, ‘I’m not feeling it, man.’
The problem was that in interpreting somebody else’s idea I could always get it wrong in some way. With Warsaw, they were all our collective ideas so who could say what I was doing was wrong? I’d made it up so I could change it. OK, there could be suggestions on how it might be better, but it was still up to each of us to sort out our own parts.
Our songs may have been inspired by our outsider feelings, but we were northern men and talking about feelings was something that men just didn’t do in the seventies. Emotions though, like water, will always find a way out eventually and music is as good a way as any. If you suggested something like that to us at the time (or even now, come to that), we would have disagreed very strongly. Fucking hell, we’re men aren’t we? None of that namby-pamby shit!
Emotions were never openly displayed or discussed, but that was not unique to us. Many of my peers have said the exact same thing. I suspect it was a generational thing. My parents, though not miser able by any standards, did not talk about emotions at all. I got the idea that it was a sign of weakness and the best thing to do was keep all that troubling nonsense bottled up in a metaphysical jar in your head – never once considering how much this imaginary container might hold or if it might need emptying once in a while.
Maybe my generation’s collective dysfunction was an overspill from the Second World War and the fact that we were now living in a nuclear age with concrete barriers and atomic cataclysm a pervasive undercurrent. Maybe Warsaw and other bands were responding to a constant subconscious awareness of darkness and threat. My parents and their parents before them had accepted that ‘the people in charge’ would sort things out and it would all be all right in the end, but this was something that the youth of the 1960s had started to question. By the seventies, we knew that the old authority was not always right. That the establishment was bunk and had had its day. That it was time for something new. That popular culture was not just a diversion for potentially troublesome exuberant youth but something that could effect real change in society. This was what I believed.
At our very first rehearsals I don’t think we even had a tape recorder so the songs really only lived in our collective imaginations and memory, except when they were unleashed in front of an unsuspecting and mostly disinterested public.
Talking of which, one of our next public outings was at the Middlesbrough Rock Garden supporting the Rezillos, a lovely bunch of lads and a lass from Scotland. The Rezillos were a kind of glam cartoon rock-and-roll band on speed, and a really good live band. They had a single out and signed a deal with Seymour Stein’s Sire label. They and their manager, Bob Last, seemed to like what they saw in us and asked us to do some gigs with them.
So on Saturday 14 September 1977 we loaded all the gear into the Maxi and Hooky’s Jag and set off for Middlesbrough.
It was like driving to the moon. I’d never driven so far in my life, up to Tyneside (almost) – Get Carter country. We only got lost once, quite an achievement really. It was one of those Indian summer days. When we finally arrived we did what we thought was our best gig yet to an initially somewhat sceptical Middlesbrough crowd.
It was a bit of a rough venue – what they call vibey when really they mean a dump. We put on a storming performance. If you look hard enough you can find it on t’internet but – without getting the vibe and seeing the good-natured violence of the Middlesbrough crowd at first hand – Ian’s spirited performance doesn’t come across. Also you can’t really see the bit where I set my shirt on fire. I think we did our first encore here. After the gig, we ate some chips and drove all the way back to Macc. I made a mental note that when we did this sort of thing again, if we ever did, it might be an idea to have some speed handy as a bit of a livener.
Our next gig was at the Electric Circus. Manchester’s premier punk rock palace was closing down for the first time, and this was one of those events that rightly had a feeling of loss and ending. Anyone who was anyone was going to be on the bill for a series of gigs.
The first weekend in October was the date for the Circus’s swansong, and Terry and Ian had badgered Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon to let us play.
So me, Terry and Ian were in the evening gloom of Collyhurst, standing outside the door of the Electric Circus, arguing and ranting and demanding that we be let in to sort out Warsaw’s appearance on the bill for the ‘first of the last nights’ at the venue. The bloke on the door was having none of this and would only open up a crack. I think he didn’t want to let any of the heat out. So, like some party-goer who’s expected invite has failed to materialise, we were indignant. Well, Ian was mostly. We’d had a few drinks in the pub across the way and he was not taking no for an answer. So here we were again, having another go at gatecrashing the gig. I was just there as backup and to make sure he didn’t get into too much trouble.
‘Richard said we could play.’
‘Whose we?’
‘Warsaw.’
‘Don’t know anything about it. Anyway, he’s not here is he?’
‘Well, Richard Boon said it’d be OK. Let us in and I’ll get him to sort it out.’
‘He’s not here.’
‘Yes, he is. I’ve just seen him. Richard! Just let us in for a second, mate, and I’ll sort it out with Richard. Richard! It’ll be OK, honest.’
The door keeper’s resolve weakened for a second and we barged our way past. We were in.
Perhaps emboldened by his blagging entry, or maybe it was the
booze reacting with the rush of warm air, we elbowed our way forward into the shortly-to-be-no-more venue. But Ian seemed suddenly distracted. One minute we were searching for Dave or Richard, anyone who could get us on to that stage, and the next Ian was entwined around a passing blonde punkette and locked in an embrace that could only be termed ‘serious snogging with tongues’. It was so out of the blue I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing, so I closed my eyes and opened them again. No, they were still at it. After a few minutes feeling like an awkward gooseberry, I decided that this was heading for the ‘too much trouble’ that I was supposed to be avoiding, so I grabbed hold of Ian and dragged him off. We both carried on as though nothing had happened and the young lady staggered off into the crowd.
I should have reminded him that we had just left Debbie across the road in the pub. That couldn’t have just slipped his mind, could it?
Luckily we bumped into some people who recognised Ian – Paul Morley and Kevin Cummins. Paul had written a bit about an earlier Warsaw performance for the NME so he was apparently OK. Ian introduced me as the new drummer. ‘Stephen’s a journalist like you, Paul. He writes for Record Mirror. Bit of competition for you there.’
He didn’t seem too worried.
Paul then remarked on Ian’s black enamel star badge. Paul was wearing the same badge but in the more popular Russian red.
‘What’s that, Ian? Not a Nazi badge?’
‘It’s the black star of the anarchists, Paul, not fascists.’ It seemed important to know these differences then.
Eventually we were steered in the direction of someone who introduced us to someone else who we could rail and rant at, and eventually we managed to extract a promise that if we came back the next night, we’d be squeezed onto the bill. A successful evening, I thought, and set to shepherding Ian out of the gig and back to the safety of the pub where we could relay the good news to Bernard, Hooky and Debbie.
‘He eats glass, you know.’
‘What?’
‘Paul Morley, he eats glass. Got any fags? I’m all out.’
The next evening we were back again at the Electric Circus and going through the usual ‘No, yer not playing’, ‘Oh yes we are’ rigmarole that seemed to go with every Manchester gig. Finally we were shoehorned on before the Prefects.
The way things worked on stage for us at a gig was falling into a set pattern. My larger than really necessary drum kit went sort of in the middle; Hooky on my left; Bernard on my right; and Ian straight in front of me. We normally only had two microphones – Ian naturally had one and Hooky tended to have the other for the odd bit of ‘backing singing’. Hooky always seemed to be a bit intimidatory in his stance towards the audience, whereas Bernard would just sort of shuffle backwards and forwards, staring at the neck of his guitar and seemingly oblivious to anything else, while Ian filled up the space in between. There was not much in the way of banter or audience ‘interaction’, God forbid. Just ‘Hello, we’re Warsaw’ and ‘This song’s called . . .’ plus the odd ‘Thank you’ from Ian, and that usually was that.
The second last night at the Electric Circus, though, things were to be a little different. We turned up and were told to get straight on or we wouldn’t be playing at all, so we chucked the gear onstage and started frantically setting up in front of the night’s assembling audience. A chap from the PA asked me how many vocal mics we would like.
‘Two,’ I said.
‘Well, the next band’s got three so you’ll have three too. Won’t be a problem?’
‘No, shouldn’t be a problem at all, thanks,’ I said and wondered why he had asked in the first place.
So there were three mics in a line when we hurried on to do our set, but after our first song, instead of ‘We’re called Warsaw’ from Ian, we got, ‘Have you all forgot Rudolph Hess?’ shouted abruptly but loud and clear from Bernard, one not previously known for his off-the-cuff remarks and witty repartee. It was met with a collective where the fuck did that come from? Undeterred, we did our brief set and went home.
Where the remark came from was a book that Bernard and Ian had been reading: The Loneliest Man in the World. It was about Herr Hess and his time in Spandau Prison. There was a picture of Hess on the cover with his prison number ‘31G-350125’, which was the title of the first song we played that night – we would later rechristen it ‘Warsaw’.
So that’s the ‘where’ but as to the ‘why’ Bernard was shouting . . .
‘What was that Rudolph Hess thing all about then?’
‘Dunno, just felt like saying it.’
As catchphrases go, it’s fair to say that ‘Have you all forgot Rudolph Hess?’ was not one of the greats, but it wasn’t as though we’d be constantly reminded of it, was it? Just a spur of the moment thing, a moment in time gone forever. Not the sort of thing that haunts a band for years . . .
We were a bit disappointed with the gig – like a lot of things in life when you have high expectations, the reality never lives up. We weren’t going to be deterred though. If anything, it just added to the feeling that everyone had it in for us. We were better than them anyway. We just had to stick at it and keep writing, which was what we’d been doing in various upstairs rooms in pubs in Macc and Salford. As well as ‘31G’ (aka ‘Warsaw’), we’d written ‘Leaders of Men’, ‘No Love Lost’ and redone an old song, ‘Novelty’.
Have you all forgot about . . . what’s ’is name?
In Macc, we rehearsed at the Heyes Hall community centre and in an upstairs room at the Talbot – my favourite pub in the town. It was a shithole really, but the landlord, Tony, was a great Macc eccentric. He owned an ostrich, which he claimed he was going to race. As proof of the bird’s existence, the regulars were invited to Tony’s ostrich-egg omelette gourmet evenings. They were disgusting. If you’re ever offered an ostrich egg dish, my advice is to decline politely.
After all my reading of interviews with drummers, my concept on what drums should do in a band had become distilled down to ‘the drummer is the bridge between the bass and the guitar, the thing that glues the two together’. I may have made that up or dreamt it, but it struck me as a pretty good idea to try out.
The problem I had with this idea was in most tunes the bass is playing a simplified version of the guitar part – certainly in the earliest, thrashy songs we did. Either a throb or a very similar part an octave or two down. So what I did was thrashy too. Nothing wrong with that – playing thrashy drums is a lot of fun and a great way to keep fit and healthy – but I played far too many busy fills in an attempt to sound a bit like Keith Moon or Rat Scabies. I mistakenly thought I was being clever and flashy. I wasn’t. It just sounded bad. So I stopped. Sometimes it’s hard to convince a young, enthusiastic and energetic drummer that less is more. Trust me, with drums usually it is.
In later songs, though, as the tempo slowed, Hooky’s playing got more melodic and Bernard’s guitar parts became sparser. A space opened up in the music where the drums could be more interesting. I was less of a clock because the entire band was the clock. Somehow Hooky’s bass and my drums just gelled instinctively. We never talked about it or thought about it. It just worked. For a drummer, having that kind of understanding of each other’s playing is the most import ant thing. I was lucky, particularly in the early days of Joy Division, that Hooky was such an inventive musician. We locked together and left a space for Bernard and Ian to occupy without it ever sounding too busy or messy.
The drums and bass are to me the engine of the band, its beating heart. The thing that moves the whole edifice while at the same time keeping it together.
The music that I liked best would invoke a picture of the world it inhabited. It sounded like it came from somewhere or had a sympathetic mood. Most progressive rock by the mid-seventies seemed to be all about musical one-upmanship or whimsical concepts. It waffled and said nothing to me.
I judged our music good or promising when, if I closed my eyes, I could see something. It may have been difficult to ve
rbalise exactly what that something was – just a shape or colour, something vague like a blue triangle or green water – but that meant that the sound wasn’t a dead end. To have to struggle to see anything meant the song was ultimately a contrived waste of energy.
High-energy rock is about the riff: everybody plays the riff or some slight, harmonically enriching variant, making an irresistible force. (Check out the MC5’s Kick out the Jams – no solos.) It’s pretty simple really and it works, and that was what Warsaw did for the most part.
Virtually every song began:
‘What sort of song do we need?’ Ian or more likely Bernard would ask.
The answer was (and is) invariably, ‘A fast dancey one!’
‘Right, Steve, a fast dancey drum riff please.’ Or ‘A jungly tom riff.’
I would then, hamstrung perhaps by my inability and unwillingness to dance, interpret the direction as best I could. Fast was no problem – everyone knows what fast is – but dance could mean anything. Seeking guidance I would ask, ‘Fast tommy? Or fast snare?’
Usually the answer was fast tommy and we were off down the road to ‘Ice Age’, ‘Wilderness’, ‘Komakino’, ‘Dead Souls’, etc.
No one ever notices the drummer in the band. Maybe that’s why I tried to compensate by having too many drums and cymbals piled in front of me. But being unnoticed was part of the attraction of drumming for me. I didn’t much fancy the idea of being at the front. Seeing the whites of the audience’s eyes. I enjoyed being hidden at the back, going into a kind of trance when I played.
Drummers have an odd relationship with time – they hate being late. I know that sounds like a joke but it’s true. Not just in music but in life. Turning up late for an appointment really annoys them. It fills me with a sense of failure. Every drummer I know gets uptight and obsesses about tardiness, as though we are engaged in a constant, unconscious battle with time. As a type, drummers seem quite relaxed, easy-going and willing to experiment. I am one, so I would say that. To most other musicians, the idea of the crazy drummer is the default stereotype, like the prima donna lead singer.
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