‘This’ll look great on a T-shirt,’ I said.
The others winced. Band T-shirts are shit. We’re never doing T-shirts. EVER.
Principles again. It does look good on a T-shirt though, doesn’t it? I bet you’ve got one.
The inner sleeve’s photo of the hand through the door was Rob’s idea, and the ‘Inside Outside’ naming was me.
Peter Saville took all this and turned it into a sleeve that is timelessly perfect in its mysterious textured blackness.
Unknown Pleasures was given fantastic reviews almost everywhere. It seemed as if Factory could do no wrong, and the music press suddenly became interested in us.
Despite the fact that I avidly read the music press and had done a tiny bit of writing myself, I did harbour a sneaking suspicion that most of its contributors were pretentious dickheads at heart. But you’ve got to make a living somehow. And anyway, the feeling was probably mutual.
If there was one person whose opinion on music was generally respected it was John Peel. He was essential listening and I very rarely missed his Radio 1 show. John was the absolute antithesis of a pretentious dickhead. He played tracks from Unknown Pleasures regularly and spoke of it enthusiastically. We’d done a session for him in January which had featured some tracks from the album. These serve to give a hint of what Unknown Pleasures would have sounded like without Martin’s production. They were fun things to do – Peel sessions. No struggling to get a sound. No messing about. Basically do each song live, maybe the odd overdub, then back in time for tea. Getting a session on the Peel show was a major stepping stone for many unsigned bands.
His show was always entertaining and educational. John always seemed to play music that he genuinely enjoyed and that enthusiasm was genuinely infectious. It encouraged an open mind and exposed me to a lot of great music that I would never otherwise have discovered. His opinion was something that mattered to me and getting played on the Peel show was the first sign that we were getting somewhere.
22
NOT NECESSARILY COMMERCIAL
We were all inarticulate. I certainly was. We couldn’t verbalise what it was we felt or wanted. We especially couldn’t have explained why we felt the way we did. We definitely never spoke about these things to each other. Writing and performing becomes a kind of therapy. It, whatever it was, got put in the songs. We never thought about it or analysed why we liked our music. We were instinctive illiterates but we knew we were onto something.
I became even more inarticulate when we were questioned as a group. Rob usually took up the slack, goading us into participation or silence depending upon the nature of the questioning. Ian and Bernard came across as the more artistic types, while Hooky and I frequently seemed more like mechanics or builders.
We didn’t like the media nosing about in our business. We were a gang of misfits.
Having recorded and released our first LP, tradition dictated that to expand our horizons, a single was required to complement it. Another word for this would be promotion but that was not part of our vocabulary. Promo was a dirty word.
Rob, though, was adamant that we keep ‘Transmission’ in reserve for just this purpose. We agreed it was the most commercial and radio friendly of all our songs, in that it mentioned the wireless in the lyrics, I suppose. I’m still not sure exactly what ‘commercial’ means here. It had a chorus and it was catchy. Everything you need for a hit single. It also had that rare effect of eliciting goose bumps when it hit the chorus – maybe that was it.
What to put on the B side was slightly trickier. A major label trick would have been to put a track off the album on there, but our principles on standalone singles wouldn’t allow this: it had to be something unique. I don’t think we had a particular soft spot for ‘Novelty’ – it was an old song harking back to the days of Warsaw – but in the spirit of want not, waste not . . . ‘Novelty’ it would be.
Late July 1979 saw us back in Strawberry, on the night shift this time. After the album sessions, we pretty much knew what to expect from Martin. We were wise to his ways. This time we decided we would keep badgering him in turn until we got our way.
Should be simple. Probably get home for bedtime.
During the recording of ‘Transmission’, we got the idea for a fast Morse code kind of riff, and finally my years of plonking about tunelessly on the dining-room piano paid off. This was a piano part for a drummer. A line of whizz later and I was battering away at the keys of the Strawberry Steinway (which featured on many a hit) like it was a hi-hat. There was no melody – just one note, speed and brute force. I was now technically a multi-instrumentalist. Honest I was! Listen carefully to the last chorus.
The stumbling block on this session turned out to be the tom fills (overdubbed of course) on ‘Novelty’, for they took an eternity.
Ian, Rob, Hooky and Bernard, engaged in a marathon pool tournament downstairs in the Strawberry kitchen/TV/recreation area, were asking themselves:
‘What are them potheads up to now? You go and have a look.’
‘Best of three?’
The loser of a game would have to venture upstairs and report back.
‘Still doing the toms, Rob.’
‘We’ll be here all night at this fuckin’ rate.’
Perhaps the drugs didn’t help shorten the process, but Martin was after something rare and elusive. Explaining what that thing might be was not his style. His approach went something like this . . .
‘I know what it is I’m after and I’ll let you know what it is when I hear it.’
Which was very helpful.
One strategy for dealing with this would be for someone to venture into the control room and say something like, ‘Fucking hell, Martin, that sounds great! Don’t go over that take. That’s the one!’
Very occasionally it might work but Martin was singularly bloody-minded and could be very difficult to sway. Working with him was always an education, but at times it could feel more like a war of attrition.
‘Transmission’ was the first time we were unanimously unhappy with Martin’s mix. Ian was especially displeased and for once Martin seemed to take our views onboard. I don’t think he was satisfied with it either and he did a remix. This time with supervision.
I wasn’t totally happy with what Martin did on ‘Transmission’. His method of recording each drum separately gave him the ability to manipulate the sound easily, to the extent that he could change the pattern to something I wouldn’t naturally have played. Sometimes it just felt or sounded wrong to me (I bet no one else has ever noticed or cared). But the piano bashing kind of made up for it.
Despite this I got on well with Martin and I respected his judgement and ability. He liked Todd Rundgren’s stuff, admired the production on Love’s Forever Changes and being a fan of electronic music generally meant that, to me, he was an OK guy at heart. He was scientific and very well informed about what was happening in the world of technology, particularly in regard to how it might be useful for the jobbing musician/producer in making innovative and different-sounding music. In many ways Martin reminded me of two of my musical heroes: Joe Meek and Conny Plank.
One weekend, Martin invited me down to Strawberry to do some drums on John Cooper Clarke’s next single, ‘Gimmix’. I’d become used to working with him and Chris Nagle, and expected the process would be pretty similar. But playing without the rest of Joy Division felt like being a fish out of water. Drumming along to something that wasn’t the product of the four of us felt odd, a bit alien somehow. Instead of someone nipping out for chips at lunchtime, Suzanne, Martin’s partner, arrived with a buffet selection of wine and cheese. It was far more civilised than I was used to and that made me feel even more uncomfortable.
It was the usual drumming in sections/one drum at a time routine that we’d been doing with Joy Division but Martin’s dub-style bass playing took some getting used to. It turned out OK, but it was a bit heavy going. I didn’t really enjoy the experience at all, but I learned one thing
: I would never be a session drummer. My session fee (Musicians’ Union rates) went straight to Rob and into the band kitty. But I came away from the experience with a much greater appreciation of what I had with Hooky, Ian and Bernard.
To say Unknown Pleasures was a success is a bit of an understatement. It was released on Factory in June 1979 and, like some indie Dark Side of the Moon, it took up residence in the Independent chart and stubbornly refused to budge. (Look how seriously the biz were taking this indie thing – its own chart. You can tell you’ve made it when you get your very own chart.) ‘Transmission’, released in October, in its turn helped keep the album from being displaced from the Indie top ten. As a bite-size introduction to Joy Division it was perfect.
These were the days when indie actually meant something. The chart was for independent labels only – technically, anyone not distributed by the majors, though stealth and guile were already seeing them turn up in disguise. ‘Independent-sounding’ labels owned by a major but not distributed by it – cake and eat it anyone?
The success of Unknown Pleasures was of course good news for Tony and Alan. Factory was soon the coolest label on the independent block. It had class, style and Tony’s unshakeable self-confidence.
Fast forward to October 1979 and we were back in Cargo in Rochdale to record ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Dead Souls’ – our two newest songs. If the Factory Sampler had been the bridge between An Ideal for Living and Unknown Pleasures then ‘Atmosphere’ did a similar job leading up to Closer.
While we were in Cargo, we decided to record the old fave ‘Ice Age’ as well, for possible inclusion on a Futurama festival tie-in compilation album. One thing these three songs had in common was they all featured lots of drums. Yippee, great for me! Hours of drum sound-checking with Martin.
Back in a 16-track studio instead of Strawberry’s 24-track meant fewer studio compilications than on Unknown Pleasures. Cargo more than made up for this with its fantastic-sounding tape machine – a Valve 2-inch 16-track. A big, punchy sound, especially on drums. The songs were the most accomplished and sophisticated yet. ‘Atmosphere’, the most keyboard-based song to date, was also the most spinetinglingly beautiful.
The three tracks were recorded more conventionally than most of Unknown Pleasures with all of us playing together in a room, as opposed to the bits-and-pieces approach. Most likely to save time more than any other reason. It was never going to be that easy, was it?
Martin’s latest painful innovation was to try to get me to play to a click from an old-fashioned piano-lesson metronome. This worked fine when I was playing on my own, but by the time everyone else came in, the click became inaudible no matter how much Hannett cranked up the volume. It was swamped by the bass, and it became impossible to keep time to. The click idea soon got dumped – around take three, I think. To compensate for this, Martin came up with an experiment using the AMS: a cascading delay, pitch-shift effect. A very short metallic sound was processed, its pitch getting shifted down a semitone, slightly delayed, then fed back in again, and the whole process repeated itself over and over again. Until the signal decayed into silence.
I had the chime off a broken tambourine perched on a scissor blade held very close to a microphone: softly pinging the chime produced the shimmering icy bell effect for the chorus on ‘Atmosphere’. I’ve seen ‘the chimes used by Joy Division on their track “Atmosphere”’ for sale on eBay a few times and more lately in musical car-boot sales. It’s hilarious. It would have been so much simpler to use good old-fashioned metal and wood, but that was no fun for Martin. Much more satisfying to get the ham-fisted drummer to delicately ping a precariously balanced tiny chime for a few hours and let digital technology do the rest.
Another trainspotter fact about the writing of ‘Atmosphere’: it was one of those ‘we’ve got a new (well new to us) bit of gear, let’s write something with it’ songs. In the case of ‘Atmosphere’, this was another keyboard: it was a Woolworth’s Winfield brown Bakelite plastic reed organ. It featured chord buttons: press a button to play a chord. Beautifully simple. It had a lovely mournful tone that gave the mood of the track. On the record, it’s the thing that does the melody line. We used to do the whole song with it live, until it got dropped and shattered into a thousand pieces. The fragility of Bakelite. Strangely, despite scouring eBay and musical flea markets, I’ve never been able to find another one exactly the same. Its finest hour was on a very early version of ‘Atmosphere’ when the song was still called ‘Chance’.
Eventually, the Woolie’s organ was permanently replaced by the ARP Omni-2 synth. This would feature on several of the next batch of songs we wrote that ended up on Closer ; ‘Heart and Soul’, ‘Isolation’ and ‘Decades’, plus ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. Bernard even tried coaxing Ian into playing the Omni on one of these. But as ever Ian was reluctant, claiming the synth never worked whenever he went near it.
In more musical experimentalism, Hooky bought a six-string bass. On the strength that it was two strings better than a regular bass, I guess. Hooky used this to play increasingly more melodic parts instead of the traditional rhythmic bass riff, the drums taking up any slack in the rhythm department.
1979 fanzine. A scapegoat?
The tracks we recorded at Cargo were a more accurate representation of how the songs sounded live. We were all happy and the production moans were non-existent. Almost . . . as time went on I learned that the chances of everybody being universally happy about something in a band were pretty much zero. Compromise meant give and take; it all depended on how much you were prepared to give to keep the wagon rolling.
That these tracks were recorded almost for the hell of it and not with any specific release in mind says something about the creative freedom we had with Factory. I say ‘almost for the hell of it’, though I do suspect there was an inkling that ‘Atmosphere’ would make a great follow-up to ‘Transmission’. Just the vaguest of inklings, mind.
‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Dead Souls’ were released in March 1980 by Jean-Pierre Turmel’s French label Sordide Sentimental rather than Factory. Our non-deal with Factory meant that we were free to do this. Ian was keen on Sordide Sentimental, who did what amounted to limited-edition art pieces rather than commercial releases. He’d come across them through a Throbbing Gristle single, which Jean-Pierre had released six months earlier.
By the end of the seventies, the concept of the extended 12-inch single mix was becoming a popular item. The first 12-inch single I’d come across had been in 1976. Oddly it was a version of ‘Substitute’ by the Who, of all things. It was no longer than the 7-inch but it was a lot louder and punchier-sounding. The extra groove thickness saw to that. But it was in disco that the 12-inch found its natural habitat, Donna Summer’s extended ‘I Feel Love’ being the prime example.
I think it was the 12-inch of Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ that was responsible for the idea that we should try and do an extended version of a track. Maybe it was just to try and beef up the sound of something that we felt sounded particularly weedy on Unknown Pleasures or, more likely, because it was something that Rob liked the idea of doing. Either way, we ended up reworking ‘She’s Lost Control’ with the idea that it should be longer, louder and more percussive.
Rather than take what had already been recorded and add to it, we started again from scratch. This began with building the toughest drum sound I could come up with using real drums augmented by the Synare 3 and the SDS4 (Simmons Drum Synthesiser 4). I knew by now what to expect from Martin and could play the drum parts in sections with a lot more confidence and conviction than I had on Unknown Pleasures. All was going swimmingly when an aerosol of tape-head cleaner caught Martin’s eye. A couple of playful squirts and a manic Hannett cackle later convinced the producer he had found the missing percussive element that the track was crying out for.
Let the drummer torture commence. There had to be some, didn’t there? I was not getting away with it that easily. Martin’s idea was to augment the white n
oise chi-chi parts with the aerosol squirts.
‘S’gonna add a bit more top-end fizz,’ he said enthusiastically.
Chris set up a mic in the small wood-and-glass vocal booth and shut me in there.
‘Give us a few squirts for level’ was the slightly surreal request I heard in my headphones.
I commenced to squirt the aerosol of Isopropyl Alcohol in time with the track. I don’t know what unnatural spirit of optimism led me to believe this might be a quick job. It was probably that same gung-ho spirit that had led me to neglect the safety warnings that the can carried.
There were two main ones: ‘Always use in a well-ventilated area’ and ‘DANGER HIGHLY INFLAMMABLE’.
The small stylised rendering of a blaze was a bit of a giveaway. But in my keenness to get on I was oblivious to even this.
Instead I chi-chi’ed away like a squirting fool as my completely unventilated confined space began to fill with the ever-so-slightlytoxic fumes. I put the buzzy headache and blurred vision down to some unforeseen side effects of the last joint, like you do. But by the end of take four and aerosol number two, things were looking distinctly weird. But we had got to the end.
Thank fuck for that, I thought, taking off the headphones and pulling out a reinvigorating cigarette and . . .
Luckily Rob had pinched my lighter and was too lazy to come into the booth to give it back. It was only as I stepped out into the fresh blast of air-conditioned chill that I realised that my tiny room was now a highly explosive, haze-filled chamber. One match and ka-boom, another exploding drummer like something straight out of Spinal Tap.
This session was also part of the quest for the perfect recording of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. The song was nearly six months old, and this was our third go at recording it. One John Peel session and one session in Pennine, which Martin didn’t feel was an adequately-equipped studio for the job. Third time lucky you might think. But no . . . as was becoming traditional, Martin liked to mess with singles and their rhythm tracks. This one would continue until the end of the month: at the time, the longest we’d spent on one track.
Record Play Pause Page 29
