Ian wanted the vocals to be affected like John Lennon’s with an echo/delay thing.
‘No, not got one of them either. Could stick a bit of ADT on it, sounds just the same.’
This ADT sounded like a powerful device indeed. I wondered what the hell it was, how it might work and where it was hidden. It turned out it stood for Automatic Double Tracking.
We did the four songs in either one or two takes: ‘31G’ (soon rechristened ‘Warsaw’ to commemorate our former incarnation), ‘Leaders of Men’, ‘No Love Lost’ and ‘Failures’.
I think we had only written ‘Failures’ a week or two before. Ian was still working on the words. ‘No Love Lost’ was still a bit nebulous too; in fact it was so vague that it didn’t have a title when we recorded it. I think it was called ‘the new one’, the start of a great tradition.
Of the four tracks I think the intro to ‘No Love Lost’ would be the one thing that gave an indication of where we were heading musically. The second bit of the song, I pointed out to Bernard and Hooky, sounded a bit like the Doors’ ‘Changeling’.
‘No it doesn’t. I’ve never heard that track in my life so how could it?’ was Bernard’s response.
You can’t argue with logic like that unless you really enjoy arguing.
We knew what overdubbing was – recording another instrument or vocal track on a spare tape track, alongside the tracks previously recorded. Bernard overdubbed a guitar solo at the end of ‘Failures’ and sorted out the guitar panning effect on ‘the new one’, on which Ian then did a bit of reading from the House of Dolls book he happened to have handy. It filled out a loose bit of the song he hadn’t written any words for. This then got titled ‘House of Dolls’ before becoming ‘No Love Lost’, with those words coming from the extract he’d read. He got a bit of dubby echo stuck on his voice as well.
By the end of the day, we’d finished our first record – Joy Division’s first record. We went away happy having climbed one step up the ladder to who knows where.
At work the next day, I sat at my desk littered with unheeded memos from my father, an overflowing ashtray, empty pay packets, and empty milk and Lucozade bottles, smoking a fag and supping a nourishing pint of milk. I daydreamed about the rave reviews our EP would garner, about the journalists who would flock to interview us.
‘Stephen, how would you describe your music?’ they were bound to ask.
‘Brutal, raw and honest,’ I would swiftly reply, stubbing out my No. 6 for emphasis.
‘They used to be called Warsaw, now they’re called Joy Division and that was really rather splendid, a track from their first EP . . .’ I imagined a DJ who sounded a lot like John Peel saying until my reverie was rudely interrupted by the phone ringing under a pile somewhere in front of me.
‘Where’s my bloody cylinder jackets? You said they’d be here two days ago. I’ve got customers screaming at me. Pull your effing finger out and get them here, first thing tomorrow!’
‘Oh yes, sorry, yes of course, I’ll call you straight back but I’m pretty sure they were out on the van today,’ I lied and fell back to earth.
A week or so later I got a call of a different nature, some bloke from Virgin records. I thought it was a joke at first (how did he get my number anyway?), but it turned out that two of our songs from the Electric Circus gig has been recorded and they were thinking of putting one of them on an album to commemorate the gig/cash in.
Fucking hell, which one? I don’t know why I expected the man from Virgin to be familiar with our repertoire but I did. He said he didn’t know what the songs were called but he would send us a cassette of a rough mix of the songs (which they had got Mike Howlett of Gong to mix) and a copy of the contract that we would need to sign.
Bloody hell! A record contract! This was brilliant, maybe they’d put the EP out as well . . .
The two songs were ‘Novelty’ and ‘At a Later Date’. We had only done three songs at the gig but ‘31G’ had got missed off. Bernard’s little bit of banter at the end, though, had not. The Rudolph Hess bit was there, loud and clear, now sounding like the introduction to ‘At a Later Date’.
The contract might as well have been in Chinese. ‘The party of the first part hereafter referred to as . . .’ etc., etc. We kept looking for the bit where it said how much we would get paid, but could make head nor tail of the jargon. Terry had a go (I think Terry might have tried asking Richard Boon’s opinion), we all had a go, and came to different conclusions. Even though we knew we should have shown it to a lawyer we didn’t. One, we had no money, and, two, we would most likely sign it anyway even if it meant we would have to pay the record company, which it probably did. But we would have a song on a proper record label – Virgin, the Pistols’ label, good old Richard Branson, what a bloke.
But which track to use? I think I asked if they could go with ‘Novelty’ but there were some ‘technical issues’ with the sound (so they said). ‘Oh, OK, but do you think you could perhaps lose the, er, banter at the start of “At a Later Date”?’
‘Oh yes, of course, no problem,’ they lied
‘Oh and do you think you’d be interested in putting our EP out?’
Er, no. Good old Richard Branson.
With a peculiar symmetry, on New Year’s Eve 1977 Warsaw played their final gig in Liverpool, the city where I’d played my first. The venue was different though: the Swinging Apple.
It was an upstairs club with a hole in the floor. The building looked as though it was about to be condemned. It was a fantastic gig, possibly one of Warsaw’s best, but if you can’t do a good gig on New Year’s Eve there’s something wrong somewhere. We ended up doing two sets, possibly interrupted by the chimes of Big Ben. We played every song in our repertoire and they still wanted more, so we did a made-up-on-the-spot spirited version of Iggy’s ‘The Passenger’ and old standby ‘Louie Louie’, with improvised lyrics.
Then that was it. It was 1978 and Warsaw were no more.
Bands who changed their names:
• The Warlocks – The Velvet Underground
• The Warlocks – The Grateful Dead
My ‘Press Release’.
• The Autistics – Talking Heads
• The Quarrymen – The Silver Beatles – The Beatles
• The Ravens – The Kinks
• The Golliwogs – Creedence Clearwater Revival
• The Hype – U2
• The Detours – The High Numbers – The Who
• The Pendletones – The Beach Boys
• Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem – Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Warsaw – Joy Division
14
AN IDEAL FOR LIVING
Being in a band felt like being some sort of rebel – a way to escape the dull workaday routine of life, it showed your rejection of your elders’ values, set you apart, gave you a form of freedom to do what you wanted, when you wanted, how you wanted. Then along came the lady from London, well-meaning I’m sure, and oops you have to obey someone else’s rules if you want to play the game. Compromise in other words, sell yourself out – OK, in a tiny way – but still . . . There’s always the voice of authority lying in wait to trap you.
Three weeks later we were Joy Division, playing our first gig at Pips – number one in Europe, the TV ads used to say – on Fennel Street in Manchester.
Yes, we were playing a disco that advertised on TV. I think Pips was trying to move on from its Bowie/Roxy crowd and attract a new wave crowd.
Another chaotic Manchester gig: Ian nearly didn’t sing at all after being thrown out for kicking glass about. He was only being helpful, trying to tidy the place up a bit, as I recall. Hooky, wanting something better than his old EB-0 copy, had recently purchased a new bass guitar, a lovely-looking Hondo Rickenbacker copy (I’ve always liked the shaped of Rickenbacker instruments; they sort of look almost edible somehow). Lemmy used to have a Rickenbacker bass in Hawkwind so they must be good. But this ‘would be
’ Rickenbacker bass had a design flaw which meant that its low strings would pop out of the nut – a technical term for the bit of wood at the pointier end of things that keeps the strings parallel and therefore playable and tuneable. Maybe it was the way Hooky attacked the bass or maybe the guitar was a bit crap, but either way the bottom string kept springing out in a rather unexpected way. This was mostly either unnoticed or ignored by the small but leery audience (consisting of two camps: the friends of Hooky from Salford and the friends of the support band, who I think were the Stance). The two camps engaged themselves in a brawl that rolled back and forth in pendulum fashion across the front of the stage. They would stop and clap and offer desultory cheers at the end of each song, only to resume their battle as we continued our set. Ian did his best to discourage this but to no avail. The punch-up continued unabated, with Hooky joining in on his mates’ side.
Violence apart, there were one or two things of note about this gig. It was the first and maybe the only time we played Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans-Europe Express’ as intro music; and Bernard mentioned something about having seen that bloke from Rafters, that DJ fella, who was going on about wanting to manage us or something. I don’t think this was greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm. Maybe it was just not the right time.
We were still after a London gig and a bit of record company interest would be helpful. Other bands seemed to manage it, so why couldn’t we? A phone call was probably not enough, and according to the popular wisdom in the NME, Melody Maker and fanzines of note, sending a cassette of yourself was not the best thing to do either. Too easy to ignore. Every other band under the sun was doing the same, trying to get gigs and a contract, looking for the big time.
So maybe if we turned up on their doorsteps, demo tapes in hand, we could push our way to the front of the queue and get the attention that we felt was rightfully deserved. Maybe even get played/mentioned on John Peel, you never know if you don’t try.
The trouble was, the proper job kept getting in the way. All the days off got used up very quickly due to gigs, and a speculative day out would probably call for a sickie. A one-day mystery virus of some sort would do the trick. That was difficult for me though. I had abused my so-called job nearly as much as I could, and my parents might just notice that I wasn’t at home in bed with a fever. Still, we had to give it a shot. Nothing ventured . . . so both Terry and I agreed to go to London.
I picked Terry up bright and early from I rlams o’ th’ Height (no, that’s not a silly made-up name; it’s an area of Salford). Armed with the addresses of several likely record companies and some cassettes, we the boarded an Intercity at Piccadilly Station, bound for Euston. All set for a day of no-nonsense record-label bartering and schmoozing. I should emphasise here that the addresses and the tapes were Terry’s managerial responsibility.
We’d been rehearsing the night before at the Big Alex in Moss Side, an old hotel that seemed to have a band practising in every room. It was cacophonous. You had to wait for a gap in the racket before you could have a conversation. The deal was that each band would have to perform before the pub’s clientele in exchange for a reduced rental. I think we only stuck it out there for one night.
So, with cassettes in hand and a potted history I’d banged out on my typewriter, me and Terry did our tour of record company offices: Virgin, United Artists, Polydor, EMI, Rak, CBS . . .
Ask for the A & R man. That’s what the guide to the music business said you should do.
The A & R (artist and repertoire) man, it explained, was the bloke whose approval you had to seek. He did the signing of bands for massive advances and paid for expensive dinners. He knew where to get the best drugs. They also occasionally turned up at gigs looking for bands to sign up and throw money at, so the guide said. They were all blokes, and we even knew some of their names, or thought we did. Each visit elicited a similar response from the girl who opened the door. They were always girls, skinny girls with sleepy eyes.
‘No, he’s not in today,’ or ‘He’s in a meeting, leave your tape and we’ll get back to you,’ or ‘Who? No, he hasn’t worked here for years.’
The other thing these groovy hit factories had in common was outside each one was the same bit of graffiti.
‘Wise up [insert company name here] sign the Banshees.’
This looked like a good bit of promotion and we could have added ‘and Joy Division’ to their graffitied appeal, but we didn’t bring a marker pen with us. We didn’t even bring a pencil.
Of all the bands emerging in this era that would later be christened ‘post punk’, but was now just known as ‘new wave’, it would be Siouxsie and the Banshees to whom I most felt some kind of affinity. The same line-up, the bass-led rhythm, the way first drummer Kenny Morris (wonder if we were related) played mostly toms. In interviews, Siouxsie would claim the sound of cymbals was forbidden in her group and you couldn’t avoid the impression that the band were her group, contrary to the way that Joy Division were not Ian’s band. The Banshees had that gothic, foreboding sound, somehow sketching out the future from the dark of the past. Siouxsie’s singing sounded nothing like Ian’s, of course, but hearing the sessions they’d done on John Peel’s show and reading gig write-ups in the NME, I had to admit they sounded interesting. Anyone who began their career doing a version of the Lord’s Prayer would have to be a bit different.
‘Fucking bit of a fool’s errand this, Terry,’ after the fifth or sixth door closed in our faces and the charm of Soho was wearing a little thin. I was beginning to suspect that London was, if not cursed, then home to something malignant that did not want me there. This feeling was only encouraged by Terry’s insistence that I wait outside in the dripping streets of Soho while he ventured inside to try and charm the disinterested girls with his cassettes.
When we were standing outside the magnificent white elephant that was Centre Point, I was beginning to feel distinctly nauseous and out of sorts. It really felt as though London’s record companies harboured some virus that was slowly infecting me. But Terry’s attention was elsewhere. It had been caught by a young lady who was campaigning for equal rights for pandas or whales or something.
‘Just one donation, however small, could change these poor creatures’ lives completely.’
‘We’re in a band . . . from Manchester.’
‘Ooh, from ooop North, that explains your really healthy complexions.’
‘Very healthy lads us, aren’t we? Bit of a rosy glow you’ve got there, Steve, eh?’
‘Feel a bit queasy, Terry.’
‘We’re down here visiting record execs. We’re after a deal.’
The panda (or whale) woman looked impressed. Tel had that look that said, ‘I’m in here.’
But it was not to be, the sickly gooseberry that I had turned into made sure of that.
‘For fuck’s sake, let’s just go and see if we can get a gig at the Marquee and piss off home.’
The Marquee Club was closed.
We pissed off to Euston and got the last train home, me feeling more and more ill with each passing tunnel. By the time we got back to Piccadilly, I was feeling like death. I remember grimly driving to Terry’s house and dropping him off. My feverish solitary journey back to Macc was punctuated by waves of extreme wobbliness verging on blackouts. I narrowly cheated death and avoided writing off the Cortina as I slipped under the sea of sickness.
The next morning I awoke sicker than a dog. My head felt like it had been hit by a train and my ‘healthy complexion’ had turned into a mass of red spots. My made-up excuse of a serious illness had turned into a prophesy. I was laid up for days.
The rejection letters soon started turning up. Standard stuff.
‘Not what we’re looking for, etc., etc.’
Only one showed any interest at all and that was from Andrew Lauder – I think he was still at United Artists then but perhaps he had already set up Radar Records. His letter, unlike the others, seemed positive and he asked us to send him any fu
rther recordings we might make. He also returned the copy of the cassette we’d been hawking round with us. Which when played turned out to be a bit of a revelation and not a terribly good one at that. The music on the tape was virtually inaudible, being drowned out by the clatter of knives and forks, snippets of conversation and dialogue from an episode of Coronation Street – pretty avant-garde stuff.
It turned out that Terry had copied the tapes from one cassette player to another by sticking a mike in front of it while eating his tea and watching Corrie. Ian was furious. But I thought that Andrew Lauder must have really keen hearing and an acute ear for talent if he could make out anything at all from the muffled Woolworth’s cassette we inflicted on him. Either that or he had rather unusual and eclectic tastes.
Our next disappointment was when we finally got the copies of the EP, which we had titled An Ideal for Living. I went round to Ian’s and you could hear it halfway down Barton Street. It sounded great if you played it at maximum volume on a Dansette, which was Ian’s hi-fi of choice. But when you played it at normal volume and compared it to other records, it sounded really tinny and quiet, and not that great at all. Oh shit, we’d got a thousand of these fuckers; spent a bleeding fortune making them too. Most of which Ian had borrowed.
The worst thing was when we all trooped into Pips and demanded that the DJ play it there and then.
He got about halfway through one track before realising that this was a floor clearer par excellence and swiftly replaced it with the Clash. It was not how I’d imagined hearing my first record in public would be and we quickly skulked out, most likely shouting abuse at the poor DJ and calling the club’s sound system crap. It wasn’t our fault!
There must have be something wrong with the copy we gave him. Maybe it was just a few copies that sounded bad. I checked a few more at random. All the same. I had to face facts: the EP sounded dreadful. And we had a thousand of them.
We had decided that we would put all four tracks onto the record making it (of course) an EP. This happily avoided us having to make a decision as to what to leave off. We weren’t completely ignorant about the process of manufacturing records and everyone knew the longer the playing time, the more the sound would deteriorate.
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