Record Play Pause

by Stephen Morris

  There did seem to be certain personality traits that each member of the rock combo had in common with others of their ilk. But had these behaviours, which had been present since birth, somehow influenced the individual’s choice of instrument and musical role? Or was it the other way round? Had the music in some way evolved their behaviour in some way?

  Was it predetermined, some quirk of fate or just dumb luck that led bands and their members along such similar parallel paths? Is it the action of malign market forces or a shared stupidity? An undiscovered quantum force? It turns out there is a psychological concept of situationism – not to be confused with the politics/art of the similar-sounding Situationists – that investigates these processes.

  Let’s take the stereotypes of the Attractive One, the Moody One, the Mysterious One and the Wacky One. I reckon that roughly corresponds to the Fab Four and a fair quantity of other four-piece pop funsters including, to some slight degree, Joy Division.

  Two rooms were booked at the YMCA in Brussels (we were still living the high life of rock superstars): a large brightly lit downstairs dorm sleeping six with all the charm of an intensive care ward, yet none of the facilities, and a much cosier upper room, more hotel-like, sleeping four. The more artistic members of the party – Cabaret Voltaire and Ian – took the upper berth; the louts – the rest of us – made do with the lower. A fine line and a slippery slope. A band somehow stops being a single unit. Distinctions and privileges begin to eat away.

  The Plan K had something for all of us. Brion Gysin and William Burroughs set up their Dreammachine art object and were reading from their book The Third Mind in part of the venue. Ian famously asked Burroughs if he had any free copies of the book – in English – and got a predictable response. There was a pop-up cinema that attempted to show Jagger’s movie Performance, but the projector kept stalling, and writer Kathy Acker was there somewhere – all very arty and ‘interesting’, but for those of less cerebral interests there were always the crates of Belgium’s famous Duval beer, a novelty in which we predictably overindulged.

  The Plan K was a great venue and a typically European art endeavour. Repurposing an otherwise decaying building and giving it a new life. Dark and cavernous, it was the sort of place I imagined hearing Krautrock bands such as Neu! or Cluster, so I was glad to play there. It was the polar opposite atmospherically to the traditional rock-circuit gigs we were doing on the Buzzcocks tour; these being for the most part either fading variety theatres or hastily camouflaged university recreation halls.

  Two days later, we were back on the second leg of the Buzzcocks tour, charging from gig to gig in the slowly rotting car, our heads still spinning from the night before. Getting to that night’s venue as the light began to fade, just in time to soundcheck. Since our previous London gig, we now entrusted the entire setting-up of our gear to Twinny and Dave Pils, our road crew. (After flight cases, having roadies put the gear up for you is the hallmark of a truly dedicated combo.) Terry Mason had by now been permanently promoted to the front-of-house mixing desk, aided and abetted by Rob.

  At first, I distrusted Twinny and Dave with my gear. I was used to setting up myself and letting someone else do the work seemed alien and to me unnecessary. I’d been denied Meccano as a child and saw this as my way of compensating. But it’s one of the prime rules of rock so, with some misgivings, I bit my lip and reluctantly left them to it.

  Drums are funny things in that they react to their environment in peculiar ways. I’ve found they need coaxing and tweaking and, failing that, hitting very hard, just to sound the same as they did the night before. It is a bit of a black art. I wasn’t sure Dave and Twinny understood.

  The daily drinking started around four. Usually pale ale. It was generally assumed that support bands who didn’t have a rider were secretly craving India pale ale, preferably with an expired best-before date. An odd thing about the seventies was the popularity of home-brewed beer. A precursor to the boutique beer boom of today perhaps. Most of my friends had a white plastic bucket full of the stuff hiding in a cupboard at home. They would pass off its disgusting flavour as the authentic taste of real ale. None of us liked pale ale, but we drank it anyway. It was free. A bottle of pale ale, a bluey and a spliff, and I was set for the night.

  It was winter, cold and dark. When I remember Joy Division gigs, it is always wet, freezing and poorly lit.

  Ian’s appreciation of Throbbing Gristle had grown into an exchange of letters with Genesis P-Orridge, and he still admired that band’s uncompromising leftfield art noise approach. Something that he didn’t talk about much with the rest of the band. I didn’t blame him. It would inevitably result in a round of band piss-taking.

  One night later on in the Buzzcocks tour, I think it was Guildford . . . ‘Er, Rob, any chance you can put Throbbing Gristle on the guest list for tonight, please?’

  Bored and feeling marooned in the fluorescent strip-lit dressing room before the gig, I rummaged through my bag and found an old bright red Frank Zappa T-shirt with hippie-style flared sleeves.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’

  I was not renowned for my fashion sense and even I knew this was a bit crap, but it was my last clean shirt.

  ‘Fucking hell, Steve, yer not thinking of wearing that are you?’ said Rob.

  ‘Er, well actually . . .’

  ‘Tenner!’ said Bernard. ‘I’ll wear it for a tenner.’

  ‘Fiver,’ said Rob, always a betting man.

  The idea of Bernard dressed in a vividly coloured hippie shirt amused us all, but Ian was absent from this bit of wardrobe-related bargaining. The bargaining continued getting progressively more outrageous until a compromise was reached. Bernard would go on wearing the shirt and a pair of crushed-up beer cans attached to his feet with string.

  It’s amazing the things that boredom transforms into the height of hilarity. Rob, Hooky and me were falling about in hysterics trying to devise a successful way of attaching the cans to Bernard’s feet.

  The door opened.

  ‘The band are just in here, Genesis, would you like . . .’

  ‘All right, Ian. Bernard’s going on dressed like this for a tenner, what do you think?’

  Ian did not see the funny side at all. Throbbing Gristle were not the sort of band who wore stupid T-shirts and had beer cans for shoes. Our antics embarrassed him in front of his new friend.

  Of course Bernard welched on the bet, but Ian was still not amused.

  In terms of his health, Ian, for the most part, coped with the tour pretty well but as it wore on the daily repetition of late nights and long drives took its toll. It was the same for all of us: the stag-party gang mentality will get you quite a long way in your twenties. These days, when I look back at the list of dates we did and the short amount of time we did them in, I am agog at the seeming logistic impossibilities of it all. I wonder, How did we do all that? I couldn’t do it now. But time always takes its toll and towards the end of the tour Ian was having some terrible seizures. Bournemouth was particularly bad, ending in a trip to hospital. Before the onset of these, his mood would darken. He would become childishly argumentative and generally uncharacteristically unpleasant towards everyone. It’s easy to think we should have spotted the signs in hindsight, but in the there and then, it all just seemed part of tour fatigue. Just keep going and it’ll get better, I thought, ever the unconvincing optimist.

  The world of four lads on the road was only thinly connected to the ‘real’ world of home by payphones.

  ‘Got to go, love, no more ch . . . beep, beep beep.’

  This musical road movie was interrupted by the arrival of the Wives and Girlfriends for the two Buzzcocks’ shows we did back in Manchester at the end of October.

  When two worlds collide, it’s rarely good. Playing in the vicinity of Manchester was an invitation to over-complication: never on your own doorstep, lad, not when it comes to sexual shenanigans.

  A West End and BBC TV staple of the fifties and sixties
was the series of Whitehall farces produced by the late great Brian Rix. Farces often start with a little lie, a little bit of deception, which snowballs into a convoluted tale of misadventure and misunderstanding, with the central character’s fortunes consequently placed in increasing jeopardy, all to hilarious effect. Should there ever be a need to reboot the Whitehall farce, the band on tour playing a home gig would provide an excellent alternative situation.

  For there in one corner of the Apollo dressing room was Debbie, and just over there in the other was Annik . . .

  This was the Saturday night, and the tiny dressing room was packed with the ever-expanding throng of well-wishers who provided just enough cover to prevent the two sides of Ian’s life from colliding. I stood guard at the dressing-room door with Gillian and Julie trying to deter entry by offering prospective entrants free rides in a Tesco’s shopping trolley I had recently commandeered. The gig itself had been a bit of a weird one; the stage at the Apollo felt enormous and I think we all felt disconnected from each other. That and the pressure that always accompanied the home town show made it all a bit nervy.

  The second night was a more subdued affair: my birthday and by curious coincidence Bernard and Sue’s first wedding anniversary. In what was now becoming some crap tradition I celebrated with Gillian in the Kentucky Fried Chicken on the way home. A ‘Bargain Bucket’ marking a step up from chips and gravy.

  ‘I thought you were going to have a proper party this year.’

  ‘Next year, definitely,’ I promised and almost kept my word.

  The Buzzcocks tour ended in November with two nights at London’s Rainbow Theatre that culminated in an orgy of band japery involving mice, maggots and egg throwing. Several of these eggs fractured in the car, which was being used as a launch vehicle for our egg assault on Buzzcocks. The aroma of rotting, ground-in egg yolk lingered on . . . or it could have been the result of an earlier amyl nitrate spillage, another story that’s probably best forgotten.

  By the end of the tour my trusty drum synth was beginning to give up the ghost. A couple of its knobs were hanging off and it was getting a bit crackly and unreliable. It had never really been the same after spending the night outside in the car park of the Bournemouth Winter Gardens. It began acting up shortly after that, possibly in protest.

  It got replaced by the SDS4 that I used on the 12-inch reworking of ‘She’s Lost Control’. This was a two-channel drum synth, in some respects not as versatile as the Synare, but the range of frequencies, from below the range of human hearing to so high only bats could hear, was amazing. It did everything I needed. And didn’t run off batteries.

  If the Buzzcocks tour was us running amok in a sweetshop, Joy Division’s European tour in January 1980 was a slog. Like Scott’s visit to the Antarctic, it was cold and troubled.

  The decade had not got off to the best of starts with a Factory New Year party-cum-gig at some place on Oldham Street that Tony had papered with old Durutti Column posters. It descended into a boozy chaos that, despite the odd fight and drunken fumbles, still felt like a non-event.

  Surely this was going to be our decade, the one when it all came good.

  ‘Joy Division – dance music for the eighties’ was Martin Hannett’s prediction.

  Around the end of 1979, we had switched rehearsal rooms from T. J. Davidson’s to a place that I think Hooky had found in Lower Broughton. It was adjacent to Pinky’s Roller Disco and, as estate agents are prone to saying, ‘afforded good views’ of the swimmers in Broughton swimming baths across the street. This first-floor room we shared with A Certain Ratio.

  We took the less gloomy half of the room nearest the greasy window, through which sunlight, never mind good views, struggled to penetrate. Fellow Factory workers, A Certain Ratio, managed by Tony and Alan, had the dingy bit to the rear. Downstairs, two ladies worked industriously on sewing machines manufacturing garments of some sort. On the floor above, other bands occasionally practised and, when they did, bits of the ceiling would fall down upon my head. By anybody standards of health and safety, it was a shithole. Even the mice looked disgruntled. It had an atmosphere of a building waiting to collapse, and made T. J.’s mill seem like a palace. On the plus side, our room was adjacent to the toilet. A big step up for us.

  Starting off the new year with a trip to Europe in the depths of winter seemed like just the thing to escape this and further broaden the mind. Since Unknown Pleasures, things had been accelerating and the days of struggling to find a gig were long gone. There was always the next thing to move on to. Before we set off for our trip to Europe, Rob decided we needed smartening up. Apparently hairdressing was one of his many undiscovered talents and Rob took to administering ‘tour haircuts’ with a huge pair of rusty parcel scissors. Suffice to say our manager was no Mr Teasy-Weasy and we all ended up looking like we had recently escaped from some Siberian gulag. Only Ian was spared the shearing.

  We were off into the wider world, this time in a minibus and a van, just like a proper rock band on the road. We shared the driving, though driving on the wrong side of the road didn’t come naturally to me. It was Terry and Hooky who did the most mileage. It was gruelling – there was too much quality dope in Holland and it left me knackered. We hadn’t been eating much either; the food we had was usually at the gigs and this was generally lentil casserole or stew involving beans of some sort. Holland, it turned out, was flat and vegetarian. The venues were mostly hippie-run large bars with a large live room for bands or a subsidised community arts place. There was nothing like this at home. We would unload our gear and the rattly PA we’d brought with us, set ourselves up, soundcheck, and then try and find some food that used to have a pulse, rather than being pulse based.

  Then we’d do – for us – a long set of about fifteen or sixteen songs. Up until then our sets averaged ten songs at the most, but as this was our first headline tour, Rob wanted us to play a bit longer. I could see the point: if you were supposed to be a headline band then you couldn’t really get away with forty-minute sets. We had enough songs, so why not play them? I don’t think everyone agreed with this departure from the spirit of punk, but we compromised.

  Amsterdam, January 1980.

  We were sitting post-gig in the dressing room at the Paradiso in Amsterdam. Hooky and I were casually throwing small brown empty beer bottles onto the concrete floor. One after another, they smashed and tinkled. We laughed at the sound they made as they shattered. I’d been in the dope shop and had some Turkish hash and a couple of cookies. I was pretty spaced. It was Amsterdam, after all. We done the red-light district the night before. It had been a long day – no support band so we’d played two sets. Never let it be said that Joy Division weren’t value for money.

  Taking turns, we glugged down the tiny beers and hurled the empties as far as we could. It was a contest, but what the object was probably didn’t matter. We were both pissed and pissed off.

  ‘Fucking Dutch arty wankers!’

  It wasn’t the gig that annoyed – the gig had been great – it was the Dutch fan who appeared some time during the day and attached himself to Ian like a limpet.

  ‘You are a big fan of Faulkner, yes?’ It was less a question, more an instruction.

  ‘Er, I’ve heard of him, of course,’ Ian replied, not wishing to offend.

  This delighted the Dutchman. ‘I knew it, I knew it! I could tell from your words you are a fan of Faulkner. I have a gift for you,’ he went on, and produced a dark T-shirt bearing the title of one of William Faulkner’s better-known books.

  ‘The Sound and the Fury – that is you! You are the sound and the fury, like him you are . . .’ By now the Dutchman’s head was firmly stuck up Ian’s arse. ‘You are the great artist . . .’ etc., etc. He was convinced Ian was speaking directly to him through his lyrics, that Ian knew his innermost thoughts, they were kindred spirits. He would not let it go. Not even Rob’s ‘Oi you wanker, fuck off!’ could deter him from his goal of ingratiation.

  ‘This man
is a genius and I have a gift for him. You must wear this shirt tonight for you are indeed the sound and the fury!’

  ‘Like fuck he will! Fuck off, twatto.’

  Ian’s sycophantic new best pal was having none of it.

  It was a recurring theme that people assume you are what you write about, what you sound like. That the impression your sound creates is a true reflection of your inner selves. This was, naturally enough, the assumption that most journalists had when they came to interview us. I say this because the Dutchman had most likely used the ‘I’m a journalist here to interview the band’ ruse to gain admission in the first place.

  I could understand that – hadn’t I done a similar thing myself with the Record Mirror job? If you can’t be in a band, then write about being in a band – mythologise. Maybe that’s what I’m doing now.

  Things worked better when we allowed journalists time to hang around with us for a day and they realised we were, for most of the time, idiots.

  Interviewers always had preconceptions, they arrived with them and more often than not they could not be dissuaded. That the rest of us might be clueless they could accept, but not the main man, not Ian.

  Ian enjoyed the flattery. Let’s face it, who doesn’t like to hear themselves bigged up at some time or other? He defended the Dutchman, calling us bastards for taking against him so. The Dutchman smiled. He had won. He was vindicated. He’d known it from the start: he was in the presence of greatness.

  Ian waltzed off with his new best chum and of course wore the shirt for the second set, most likely just to annoy Rob more than to display his literary prowess.

  ‘Have you ever actually read anything by William Faulkner?’ I asked Ian after the gig.

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘but I’ll read some when I get home. That bloke made him sound really interesting.’

  We both laughed and vented our collective spleen by breaking glass on the dressing room floor.