That’s Macclesfield for you. The Beatles played here once, you know. They never came back.
With the response from the man in the pub to the EP, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
One gig (technically two as it would turn out) we did manage to get was arranged by Hooky in Salford: Wednesday night in Little Hulton at the local working men’s club, a lovely modern affair with the extremely bright fluorescent-tube lighting that was a trademark of such venerable institutions. This in itself was not too bad. It was more that it turned out to be ‘Talent Night’ that marred things.
‘I thought you said it was a New Wave Night!’
‘Nah, I said it was Rock Night, well it was last week. Ay, mate, what happened to Rock Night?’
‘Didn’t go well with the regulars. They preferred Talent Night, so we changed it back.’
Ian, Terry and Bernard were soon engaged in a fierce competition of their own, taking it in turns to try and charm the lovely lady songstress who was the act after us. I think we were on after the comedian.
Accompanied by a cover of Huddie Ledbetter’s ‘Black Betty’ that was then riding high in the charts as unrequested intro music, the club compère announced, ‘If yer like yer Ram Jam, then yer’ll like this lot . . . local heavy-rock band . . . the Joy Divisions!’
After the first song, the compère looked uneasy. By the close of the second, he was bellowing in my ear, ‘Wind it up! Next one’s yer last. Get off, for fuck’s sake, yer’ll ’ave me sacked.’
In the embarrassed silence that followed our brief set, we apologetically scooped the gear off the stage, chucked it into the waiting getaway cars and sped off into the night. We didn’t bother staying to see if we’d won. My money was on the lady songstress.
I don’t remember whose idea it was – Ian would be the prime suspect – we ended up driving to the Ranch, a Manchester punk hotspot adjacent to local drag queen Foo Foo Lammar’s nightclub. Like some pirate-raiding party, we announced that, like it or not, we were going to play. We would redeem ourselves.
Whether it was because of the gig’s spontaneous nature or, more likely, that we were all more than a bit wound up from the earlier debacle, this was a fantastic gig, filled with dangerous energy and spirit. Ian nearly took my head off with a badly aimed pint-pot throw – he was, of course, angry and wound up the tightest. The Ranch’s crowd were surprised and impressed, even if they still thought we were called Warsaw. We had seized victory from the jaws of defeat. Ace.
After that night, you’d have thought we’d have given anything vaguely resembling a talent show a wide berth.
15
HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER
Bored teenagers of Macclesfield: Julie, Gillian and Jill.
In the little room up the wooden staircase and at the end of the corridor of T. J, Davidson’s rehearsal mill, I am set up in the middle of the back wall with the door to my right. I like having a wall behind me. I worry that my drum stool will give way and collapse, and the yellow, Rockwool-insulated wall will cushion my tumble. We’ve tried peeling the hairy material off in places. It’s too great a temptation to resist.
There are two ancient, second-, third- or maybe fourth-hand electric heaters, one either side for warmth. Only one works reliably.
Hooky is set up on my left, with his big, square, yellowy-green single speaker cabinet and amp. Bernard, on the right, has a Vox UL715 series amp and cab with a chrome tube frame – the sort the Beatles used.
The tuning of strings. We have to go through this before we can do any serious playing. Bernard is the only one of us who has the gift of guitar and bass tuning. He is also the most naturally musical.
‘Third fret.’ Iiiiiiing. Bonnnng. Iiiiiiiiiing. Biiiing. ‘Fifth.’
It’s a ritual.
I roll a joint and find an empty Tizer tin to use as an ashtray.
Ian is set up facing us, with a wonky Vox column cab on either side of a newish-looking Carlsbro Viper PA amp. He is sitting between the door and the right-hand speaker cab, trying to light up a Marlboro with an expiring disposable lighter.
‘Ian? Here ya are, catch!’ as I toss my Bic lighter over to him.
‘Fucking hell, did you see that film on BBC2 the other night?’
‘The one with the girl with big . . .?’
‘Yeah, that one! Fucking hell . . .’
Something like that is how it usually begins.
Not much talk about the music. Just this and that until there’s nothing left and we’d better play something then.
As time progressed, the four us became more proficient musically and became better songwriters. No one told us how to do it. Together the four of us learned how to be Joy Division. Who else could we be?
Wednesday evenings and all day Sunday, that was our rehearsal routine without fail. There were interruptions from visitors.
T. J. Davidson, the rehearsal-mill owner (his dad really owned the place, truth be told) turned up with glamorous lady casino worker in tow.
‘How’s the motor, Tony?’ Hooky would ask. Hooky was keen on cars and scrapyards, from whence our faulty room heaters and some of Hooky’s cars were scavenged. (‘I’d like to run a scrapyard of me own one day.’)
T. J. would ask how we were doing, what gigs we had coming up. We’d ask how his label was doing, and he’d feed us bits of other resident band gossip.
‘Buzzcocks have booked a month in one of the upstairs rooms.’
Then his by now bored glamorous croupier companion would remind him that her presence was required elsewhere, and they would be off to her tables in his Roller.
Michael Gorman was another regular feature of life at the mill. He was the place’s caretaker and nightwatchman; we usually had to go and find him if we wanted to get into our room. Irish Michael (never Mick) and his big bunch of keys lived on the premises in a small room on the first floor that he shared with Woolly, the guard dog. They made an odd couple. Conversation with Michael was difficult to follow at times and was perhaps only truly understood by Woolly who, despite living up to his name, was not the most lovable of animals. Guard dogs aren’t as a rule.
‘Da Daags iz up da taap and da Cacks is com’n in layter an,’ Michael would say.
There were the other bands too, the ones more on our sort of level. Not big like Buzzcocks or Slaughter and the Dogs, who kept themselves to themselves. But Emergency, who had their own PA. They were OK. We would try and persuade them to leave the PA in the walk-in cupboard in our room so we could borrow it on the quiet. Marc Riley – he’d been in the Fall – popped in a couple of times, just looking or after borrowing a lead, and the Inadequates, to whom we were yet to be introduced, were in the room at the other end of the corridor from us, on the way to the toilets. Though pissing in empty Tizer tins remained Hooky and Bernard’s preference.
Assuming you were to make the usually icy trip to the conveniences, or if you were nipping out to Burgerland for a spot of lunch, it was only natural to have a look through a half-opened door at what your neighbours were up to.
The sound of female laughter. That would certainly pique your interest.
‘Them at the end. They’ve got a bird in there!’ was Ian’s sit-rep and we would revert to naughty schoolboy mode.
‘Steve, you go and ask if they’ve got any spare drumsticks. Say all yours are broke.’
‘Fuck off!’
‘All right, Barney,’ everyone always called Bernard ‘Barney’, ‘you go and see if they’ll lend you a guitar lead. Say you forgot one or say your amp’s bust or something.’
In the end it would nearly always be Ian, trying a bit of a blag. Like a nosey neighbour spying on the new arrivals next door with a proffered cup of sugar, off he would go to investigate.
On this occasion:
‘There’s three of them,’ like they were stray ponies or something. ‘They’re from Macclesfield. It’s them three that were in the Macc Express.’
The Macclesfield Express was my home town’s premier purveyor of
local gossip and scandal. My mother, a keen reader, came a close second; her knowledge of scandal was encyclopaedic, and her specialist subject was the obituary. The Macc Express was the sort of paper that carried stories such as ‘Local Man Abducted by UFO’ accompanied by a photo of a local man looking slightly bemused and pointing towards the heavens. Every town had one. They’d done a front-page piece accompanied by a picture of three girls holding a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks and looking suitably bored. You can imagine the photographer’s exhortations.
‘Reet reet, that’s it. Lovely, girls. C’mon, look a bit more cheesed off, like. That’s it, love it! You, the one in the middle, think Johnny Rotten. How about a bit of spitting, love? In’t that what you punks do?’
The story was that three local girls were forming a new wave group – sisters Gillian and Julie Gilbert and their friend Jill Barker were the local girls in question. Gillian played guitar and Julie and Jill did backing vocals, along with Chris Whitehead, also on guitar, ‘Tony’ on bass and an anonymous (at least to me) drummer.
The Macclesfield Express would later do a piece on Joy Division titled ‘On the Mark with Much Joy’. Not exactly ‘Freddie star ate my hamster’ is it? The piece had a similar grainy snap of me and Ian in the parlour of Ivy Lane. Ian looked to be wearing a lampshade on his head.
That three girls wanted to form a new wave band was big news in Macclesfield but I have to admit I dismissed the article (as I did much of the Express’s output) with a cynical sneer that said, ‘No chance!’
Just goes to show how wrong I can be. For here they were, the selfsame three local girls, just two doors down from us, wailing away a Sunday afternoon in Manchester.
‘Go and ask them how they’re getting home,’ Hooky said. ‘Say they can have a lift with you and Steve.’
So Ian did and that night sisters Gillian and Julie and their friend Jill squeezed into the Cortina between bits of drum and cymbal. They giggled and oohed while me and Ian did the shy-boy chat-up stuff as we ran them back to, of all places . . . Gawsworth Road, Macclesfield. The street of my childhood.
It was fate, divine intervention, synchronicity – whatever.
The Gilberts had moved to Gawsworth Road from Stretford in April 1963, just around about the time I was destroying my Beatles guitar. Their house was less than a hundred yards from mine. I must have gone past it on my bike hundreds of times. How had I never noticed? (Probably too preoccupied by plastic model planes and glue.) It is indeed a small world.
We had a lot in common, Gillian and me. Living on the same street for how many years? We were bound to have. The sweet shop down the road, the fields around the back and the pond where I’d planned my den. She couldn’t recall hearing the music of Can and Terry Riley echoing across the pasture in the dead of night, though. Must have been the wind. It was the beginning of a relationship that forty years later is still alive.
Her new wave band the Inadequates, though, is not. They lasted a couple more rehearsals at T.J.’s and one gig at a party in Heald Green, their one and only public performance.
I would meet Gillian in Macclesfield on my lunch break as I trawled Macclesfield’s record shops (I wasn’t hard to find), and the Cortina taxi service expanded to lifts to gigs, then the odd nights out in the pub. There really wasn’t much else to do in Macclesfield. We’d spend most of our time playing on the Space Invaders machine. Jukeboxes were on their way out and massive cabinets with screens that took money as they bleeped and squawked were on the way in. Those machines were mesmerising – the 2D 8-bit aliens’ inexorable march ever downwards, going faster and faster as I tried to defend Earth with the puny laser. This was the future with its bleeping, shrieking, white noise explosion soundtrack. The one I loved best of all was Missile Command, with its track-ball aiming and the strobing nuclear explosions. The fear was that this might actually happen in real life. A nuclear wipeout.
Game Over.
Gillian, Julie and Jill were collectively referred to as ‘the goshes’ by the rest of the band – they did say ‘Gosh’ a lot, I have to say – and I think Hooky fancied his chances with Julie. They’d come to the gigs in Manchester. I was only allowed to transport them to ‘home’ gigs: there was a girlfriend embargo on anything further afield. I forget who came up with that rule. Something to do with telling tales, anyway. Joy Division could be a bit sexist on occasion.
The goshes were viewed with suspicion by the rest of the band’s wives and girlfriends. They were interlopers, harlots and most likely groupies! They would be after their men, and I was a fiend anyway for dumping that Stephanie.
I was shocked that Gillian had never heard of the New York Dolls and took her to see David Johansen, the band’s singer, perform solo. She wasn’t impressed. So we spent the night just walking around Hulme instead.
Gillian was artistic. Unlike me she could draw and paint – obviously useful for an artist. She made badges, experimented with photography and designed mock-up cassette covers. She liked the Pre-Raphaelites, who I thought were a band, and Gustav Klimt, who I guessed was a German.
The Gilbert sisters stood out with their futuristic barnets. I knew nothing of the science of the styling of hair (I remain an ignoramus still), but along with her de rigueur lapels filled with band badges, Gillian’s tresses impressed. She had a crimper – ‘A what?’ I asked – and she knew how to use it. I supposed Kate Bush must have had one. Arlene Phillips’s Hot Gossip were devotees of the crimping iron. It went well with stark lighting and a glossy-lipped pout. Apart from the shared frizz, the Gilbert sisters looked, well, like sisters and to the unfamiliar they could seem identical. Not identical twins (or triplets: there were actually three of them), but there were enough similarities that could confuse the slightly pissed.
Gillian’s parents made a living making children’s clothes and selling them at local markets, Wythenshawe mostly. Their house was full of sewing machines and stacks of kid-sized blue jeans and orange shirts. Gillian and Julie worked on the market stall selling Day-Glo kids’ clothes and ladies’ undies. West Indian cricketer Clive Lloyd was one of their customers allegedly – maybe not for ladies’ undies. Their middle sister Kim did not take part in standing round in the cold and rain collecting change. Kim was fragile and liked disco, preferring the boogie nights at Macc’s Silklands Suite to new wave gigs in Manchester.
We would sit on the floor in Gillian’s kitchen listening to the John Peel show, waiting for Joy Division’s session to come on. (Yes, I am getting ahead of myself here. Joy Division hit the big time. Sort of. Sorry to ruin the surprise.)
‘The drums sound fucking shit!’ I would invariably exclaim.
The trap of vanity springs shut, for as a musician you begin to forget to listen to the song as a whole and instead focus on your own particular bit, which for you is the most important bit in the whole thing. If the drums sound shit then the song sounds shit. See where you end up? Before you can say Jack Robinson you’ve turned into a moaning musician or, even worse, a temperamental artist or, worst of all, some sort of perfectionist, leading ultimately to your transmutation into a rock arsehole.
It happens, not overnight of course, but believe me it does seep in and twist and corrupt and . . . Bob’s yer uncle. (Who were Jack and Bob? Were they related? Anybody know?)
I would grumble.
‘It sounds fine,’ Gillian would say, for she was hearing more than me.
I would haughtily and patronisingly tut and think to myself, What do you know?
Sexist pig, she thought, for I could read her mind and she, of course, could read mine.
Life in the band meant whatever social life I might have had took a back seat. Nights out became few and far between and, honestly, they were boring compared to the excitement of playing a gig or the satisfaction of working out a new song.
We all had day jobs to hold down and, although turning up for work half asleep wasn’t too much of a problem for me, for everyone else it was. Most bosses’ sympathy will wear thin after a bit.
As will relationships.
‘You think more of that band than you do of me’ is a difficult argument to counter with any degree of apparent honesty. As is the question, ‘What do you get up to at these gigs then?’
‘Why can’t I come if it’s so innocent?’
That one was dealt with by the ‘there’s no room in the car’ and/or ‘it’s not me, it’s Steve/Ian/Bernard/Hooky/and later Rob’ (the answer depending on who was doing the lying). In truth, the band embargo on wives and girlfriends coming on these outings was more to do with spoiling the chances of copping off than any more spartan or logistical reason.
Doing gigs therefore involved coming up with creative excuses for work and girlfriends: we were creative in deceit, as young men can be. Though sometimes less than plausible.
‘Always tell the truth: just miss out the bits you don’t want them to know’: the band philosophy of the time.
The blueprint for a good life in the 1970s was:
• Go to school
• Get a good job
• Meet a nice girl
• Get married
• Have kids
• Die
That was about it. Hopefully the good job would provide enough cash to pay for your burial after the last bit. But there were no guarantees. I’d already done a pretty good job of trashing the first in the list. The second, employment, wasn’t looking that great either.
This order of living was handed down like a mantra from one generation to the next and no matter how progressive or forward thinking a young man was in the seventies, it was imprinted on him from an early age.
If you did nothing, just drifted along, this is what would happen, like it or not. There would be no escape to the world of the folk on the telly. We’d never had it so good.
‘Oh, one day you’ll meet a nice girl.’
OK then, on to the third – meet a nice girl. What was that about?
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