Number two was get a record out. Everyone else was doing it. It seemed easy, just do it all yourself. All part of the fuck-the-majorrecord-labels spirit of punk.
So two objectives, a cart and a horse, a chicken and an egg, but which to do first? We decided to do both at once, just to be on the safe side.
Bands like the Desperate Bicycles had done interviews extolling the virtues and simplicity of DIY record manufacturing, and indie labels were springing up left, right and centre. So how hard could it be?
You may be wondering where all these decisions came from, how they got made and why. It was Ian doing the driving mostly, but not exclusively. We were a democracy at heart. Now before you get the wrong idea that we were like the four musketeers or something –
‘I say, fellows, I have a great idea! Let’s make a record. What say you?’
‘Aye.’
‘Aye.’
‘Aye.’
‘Motion carried! A record shall be made at the earliest convenience.’
It was not like that. It never is. Democracy can be a difficult bastard. Someone is always going to disagree and someone is going to shrug and say, ‘I suppose it’s OK but . . . What if . . .? Or how about . . .?’
Umming and aahing.
So you compromise. (Or you could just ignore the idea. Say someone came up with an idea that was so terrible that no one could possibly take it seriously – like Hooky’s suggestion that we all dye our hair blond for the next gig as a ‘gimmick’. We all agreed but only one of us actually did it. Guess who?)
So Ian then – not the easy-going Ian, this was the single-minded Ian, the Ian who believed that we were the best band ever, if only the rest of the world could be made to notice us, if the rest of the world wasn’t entirely comprised of twats anyway – would often drive the decisions so we would finally stop all the umming. Ian was ambitious, not purely for himself but for us all. He never considered himself a leader: everything was a group decision so long as you didn’t disagree.
That does make Ian sound a bit despotic, which was something he very rarely was. Ian was mostly a gentle soul. He could sometimes be controlling, not in a manipulative hurtful way, but a sort of kindhearted, helpful manner. In some ways he could even be a bit old-fashioned and overprotective. I am sure he thought he had your best interests at heart, that he could just see things better than you could. With me, he seemed to have taken over from Amanda as being some kind of matchmaker. He would say things such as, ‘Debbie’s sister fancies you. Just the other night she was saying . . .’ This despite the fact that she was recently engaged. Whenever he conspired to create a situation but it went awry or got a bit sticky, he would deny everything. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. No, I never said that!’
We needed his self-belief though. Self-belief is all. If you don’t think you’re the bee’s knees, then you’ll have a hard time convincing the rest of the world. As well as belief, you need energy. This is what the Folk Band Whose Name I Don’t Remember lacked, but we had that, oh yes. Self-belief, energy and enthusiasm. I think the technical term is balls.
Ian was a great believer in persistent ‘hustling’, as it was then called – now it’s ‘networking’. Derek Brandwood at RCA in Piccadilly Plaza was among his contacts, and others included Richard Boon, Paul Morley, and if we could get a number for that Tony Wilson off the telly, then he’d be on the hit-list too.
For my part, I completely abused my position at work. I would write up live reviews for the Record Mirror as soon as the coast was clear. Despite dropping out of the ladies’ typing school, my two-fingered technique was quickly improving. A hour or so of key bashing later, and this week’s masterful musical critique (Who am I kidding? They were embarrassingly bad) was ready to be phoned through. I would then take off my pretend journalist’s hat and put on my pretend band manager’s hat and start calling venues – I got some numbers from a music business directory, others from gig guides in the music papers.
‘Hi, I’m from a band called Warsaw, we’re a Manchester new wave band and I wonder if you could give us a gig or let me have the number of anyone who might be able to give us a gig?’
That’s how my script went, as I’m sure did Bernard, Peter, Terry and Ian’s, but abusing the telephone was easier for me, being the boss’s spoilt bastard son. For those in real jobs, getting a warning or the sack was a definite possibility.
So there I was, feet on the desk, ashtray overflowing, making my second or third ‘give us a gig’ cold call of the day. I think it was to a lady who was something to do with booking bands at the Marquee. She listened to my pitch and came back with, ‘Well, that’s all very nice, darling, but I’m afraid there is no way you’ll get on in London with a name like Warsaw. There’s already a band here called W arsaw Pakt. They’ve recorded an album and they’re going to be massive, really big. So really the best thing you could do if you want to play down here is call yourself something else. I’m sorry, darling, but that’s just how it is.’
‘Thank you very much,’ I said and slammed the phone down. ‘Snooty fucking cow!’ How could she just dismiss us that easily? I’d heard of the Warsaw Pakt. It seemed to me that they were an old London band trying to get a bit of new wave cred by recording and releasing an album in twenty-four hours (as if it was some sort of race), sticking it in a homemade-looking cardboard sleeve, then calling it Needle Time!, simultaneously evoking payola/drug abuse/vinyl abuse and just good old-fashioned mental abuse simultaneously. The bastards!
The sleeve was more than a bit like Captain Beefheart’s Strictly Personal too. On top of everything else, I thought they were rip-off twats as well.
I would make a point of not buying their record in protest. That’d show them.
They’d stolen our name, that was how it seemed to me then. Now, it’s just one of life’s coincidences. They happen, no point dwelling on them – it will drive you insane if you do, honest it will.
This was bad news indeed, for if the lady from London was to be believed and we wanted a gig in the big city (and we all did), then a change of name was something we would have to consider seriously (and so we did).
There was one bit of good news for me at any rate. One of my father’ employees had managed to find himself a better job – I may well have been a contributing factor to his exit. But there’s always a silver lining. His departure meant that there was a slightly knackered company car (Ford Cortina Mark III, Olympic Blue, VMA978M) going begging. I volunteered to care for the vehicle to prevent it from falling into further disrepair. In that I was not entirely successful.
I kept on doing Record Mirror live reviews for a few months. But it soon became apparent that despite my hints and urgings, they had no interest in me doing a piece about Warsaw, or any other new wave band for that matter.
The final straw was when I was dispatched to do a review of Smokie at the Apollo. I’d given up trying to blag my way into gigs by then. It had only worked once – Barclay James Harvest at the Palace. But having to pay to see Smokie was the height of ignominy, the ultimate humiliation. Fortunately, the Gods of Health and Safety intervened and the show ended prematurely, halted after the support act when the Apollo fire curtain got stuck. Ironic for a band called Smokie, I thought.
I took this as an omen that my days as a music journalist were over. I should quit while I was ahead. The one good thing about the Record Mirror job were the huge cheques. Not the amount they were for – all for under a tenner as I recall – but the actual size of the paper. They were from Coutts, the ancient and respectable banking company – the Queen apparently banks with them so they must be quite good. As a result, the staff at my bank started being extra nice to me, well, just nice. I don’t think they’d seen a Coutts cheque before and, thinking there would be more of them coming their way in the future, they stopped eying me with suspicion every time I appeared at the end of the queue. Also, I was paying in, not withdrawing. They liked that. They started talking to me about investing for the future, mortgag
es, insurance. My credit was suddenly good.
Still living at the parental home meant having to put up with the perennial parental gripes.
‘Turn that racket down or the electric’s going off!’
‘You treat this place like an hotel, coming and going at all hours.’
That old one. To be fair, if I had behaved in a similar manner in most hotels, I would have been shown the door sharpish. I abused my parent’s hospitality abominably. I was selfish, disrespectful and rude – like most teenagers are. That’s no excuse though, is it? I was an oik.
Following in my footsteps, Amanda had lost interest in her piano lessons and we now had an old upright in the parlour going unused. I decided to teach myself to play. Being quieter than drumming, I thought this might go down better. My ‘unique’ keyboard style – Can’s Irmin Schmidt was a major influence – only brought out my mother’s inner music critic.
‘What the ruddy hell’s that you’re playing? Sounds like the tune the old cow died on.’
I never saw that particular musical criticism in the NME singles reviews. Undeterred, I persisted with my threnody. I had no idea what I was doing but I enjoyed doing it. I’d seen Can on the Whistle Test and Irmin’s karate-chop style of playing his Farfisa looked both impressive and fun.
If the prospects of a gig down in London had temporarily faded, maybe we could get on and do a record. The guy at Pennine Studios in Oldham (where Warsaw had previously recorded that demo tape) was doing an all-in deal that included pressing up a thousand singles. It was still expensive though – a few hundred quid was an absolute fortune. Ian borrowed some money from the bank, supposedly for furniture or home improvements, and we raised some between us and booked a day in the studio. We had tried tapping up T. J. Davidson for a loan. He drove a Rolls, so we thought he must have a few bob, but no luck. T. J. was more interested in V2, whose line-up included Steve Brotherdale, one of my drumming predecessors in Warsaw, and a couple of lads I vaguely remembered from my unwilling stint at Audenshaw Grammar School. T. J. had plans for V2 and their glam-rock style, and though he was encouraging towards us (we paid him rent, after all), we weren’t really his cup of tea.
We were getting to be pretty adept at writing songs and, if calendars and memories are to believed, writing pretty prolifically too. Three songs in under two weeks is pretty good going considering that we only got together twice a week. We’d got into the swing of writing together and every song we wrote was better than the last. They were evolving, becoming less thrashy, more focused.
The way we usually went about this was by trying to play something a bit like something else we all liked, and we weren’t only looking at the Glitter Band for inspiration; ‘31G’ was the Stooges; ‘Leaders of Men’ came when we tried to play something like the intro to ‘Love Is the Drug’ by Roxy Music. The song that became ‘No Love Lost’ was a bit of a funny one as it was two ideas that got glued together – a sophisticated bit of arranging, that one. ‘Failures (of the Modern Man)’ came out of a long thrashy jam – I think I was trying to play something like John Bonham’s riff on Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rock and Roll’. I failed but somehow it ended up turning into something else, and that was the point. None of our attempts at copying ever sounded that much like the original inspiration. They just came out sounding like us.
Me and Hooky generally starting things off with a rhythm, and then Ian would do some mumbling from his lyric book (he could have been saying anything really, the gear we had for a PA was that bad) until he hit on something that fitted. Bernard either hit on a riff that sat in with the rhythm section or did something a bit melodic that floated on top.
After going on like this for a while, we’d stop, have a fag, do a bit of communal criticism/arranging, with Bernard or Ian going, ‘You play two of those chugga-chugga riffs, then a dum-dum riff, then a chugga-chugga again.’ And we’d be off again in search of the next bit.
I remember a discussion we had about an interview that the Stranglers had done in NME. They were talking about songwriting, and the way they went about it was that if an idea wasn’t going anywhere after five minutes of jamming, then it wasn’t to be. There was no point labouring on the idea, just drop it and move on to something else. This seemed like good advice so we tried to follow it. Capture the spirit of the moment and all that. It was all about the song having the right spirit, the right energy, than being musically clever. Though the more we wrote together, the more sophisticated (if that’s the right word) the songs became.
‘Naming is one of the ways in which the human race demonstrates its power over the environment. In naming we demonstrate our ability to differentiate one thing from another, to create order from chaos, to show kinship with the gods.’
I forget who said that, or something like it, which has kind of blown it, but it’s the sort of thing you put in a book to give it an air of sophistication.
Like, ‘The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind’ (Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies).
That’s better.
Having formed a band, the first big question you’re going to be asked is, ‘What do you call yourself?’
This is both extremely important in the sense that first impressions count, and unimportant in the sense that whatever you call yourself will take on a new meaning once you (and hopefully your audience) settle in to it. It can be very difficult indeed to come up with a good name or even an appropriate one. So, not something to rush into or to be taken lightly.
As band names go, Warsaw was a pretty good one. One word with a bit of icy resonance. But that was out the window now. It was back to the drawing board.
On the table were the Slaves of Venus, the Out Of Town Torpedoes and the Mechanics, so nothing that really hit you as being a knockout name for a band. None of them had that thing that jumped out, that made you think, That’s a band I would like to hear.
Coming up with a good name for your band is a tricky proposition. It is something to agonise over and I was not the best person to be asking. I mean, I thought the Sunshine Valley Dance Band was good . . .
Bernard and Ian both liked the name Joy Division. It was taken from the book House of Dolls, a novella by Ka-tzetnik 135633 (the pen-name of Holocaust survivor Yehiel De-Nur) that documents the Nazi’s sexual slavery of women in the concentration camps. That and the Hess book did give Warsaw’s literary taste a bit of a Second World War shock-story bent; Sven Hassel was another favourite author, well, of Hooky’s anyway. But to be fair, Hassel’s books were pretty popular at the time – they were the sort of thing I had seen men reading on the rail journey to Guide Bridge, that and some SF, usually by Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke. Also, more surprisingly, I’d see someone reading a book by Lobsang Rampa, the ‘plumber from Plympton’ who claimed to be a reincarnated Tibetan mystic.
Anyway, Joy Division became the favourite for a new name. We decided to try it out on people and see how it went down. In Macclesfield, predictably, it didn’t go down too well.
‘Sounds like the fuckin’ Salvation Army or sommat’ was the man-in-the-pub’s response, and I suppose he did have a point. But after a while whatever you call yourself, however silly it sounds at first, does take on another meaning. Once it gets tangled up with how you look and the music that you play, it becomes part of your image, but we didn’t think of the implications of that. We were a little naive. We didn’t think we had an ‘image’, and we didn’t want one, since you’re asking.
When the idea of actually doing our own record came up, we had quite a good selection of material. An EP was the obvious thing to do to showcase this. We talked about how the record should sound before we went in the studio, and decided we wanted something a bit like a cross between Bowie’s Low and Iggy’s The Idiot. If we told the bloke at Pennine this, he was sure to know where we were coming from.
Never judge a book by its cover.
Following on from his drunken encounter back at the Electric Circus, Ian had again been talking to Paul Morley. Pa
ul was allegedly managing the Drones at the time and he’d had something to do with production of their EP Temptations of a White Collar Worker and, so Ian said, Paul was interested in producing our soon to be record.
On a rainy Monday 10 October, 1977, I took another day off work, loaded up the Cortina, picked up Ian and off we went to Oldham. Ian had tried calling Paul to make sure he hadn’t forgotten his production promise, but there was no answer. I think he was ‘a bit ill’ or something following a night of intense reviewing. Whatever happened, the upshot was that Paul didn’t turn up.
But never mind, who needed a producer anyway? We thought we knew what we wanted and how to do it. We had a good idea of how the tracks should sound at any rate.
Pennine was a bit different from Strawberry, but then it wasn’t owned by a chart-topping band. It was a little bit like someone’s shed. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Some great records have been made in sheds. I unpacked my numerous drums from their battered cases and starting setting up. Bernard and Ian handled talking to the bloke in charge. I got a ‘Blimey, do you really need all those drums? You’re not going to hit ’em all are you?’ from the owner. A line that I’d heard a few times before at gigs.
‘Er, yes, I would like to have a go, if that’s OK with you,’ was my feeble stock reply.
Bernard asked about the possibility of making the snare sound like the one on Bowie’s ‘Sound and Vision’. We’d done a bit of research and it seemed that the Low drum sound was the result of putting the snare through a harmoniser. What that was and how it worked we didn’t know, but it made a snare drum sound great. Tony Visconti, Low’s producer, described the Eventime Harmoniser as a box that ‘fucks with the fabric of time’. Every home should have one, but Pennine Studios didn’t.
‘No, not got one of them, mate. I could stick a bit of ADT on it. It’s nearly the same thing.’
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