‘Can’t really see it with a bossa nova beat myself, Martin,’ I whinged.
‘Nah, get Gretton to get us a Ro land Compu-Rhythm. S’programmable . . .’
Inspired by Martin’s confidence – he was a sort of boffin after all and never wrong when it came to opinions on cutting-edge technology – Rob got the studio to hire in a Roland CR-78 rhythm machine.
Was I upset or offended at the idea that I might get replaced by a machine? At this point it was just another experiment and Joy Division were nothing if not game for an experiment.
The CR-78 turned up and sounded exactly like a drum machine ought to: tsk, tsk, chugga-chugga-bong, ping, you know the thing. Think ‘Heart of Glass’ or even ‘In the Air Tonight’.
Just like my childhood organ beatbox experience, it had all those slick Reg Dixon home organ beats: waltz, samba, etc. Great in its own whimsical way, but somehow a little too jolly for what I thought we were after.
‘It’s programmable, Steve. You’ve just got to go off and learn how to program it.’
Following Martin’s instruction I took the wooden cuboid and the thin but impenetrable ‘manual’ off into the Britannia Row live room for an afternoon and took up the challenge.
If you have ever tried to decipher a 1970s Roland manual you will know that these things were not well-crafted pieces of literature. Most of the text was in Japanese and the English translation seemed to be more phonetic than accurate. It was a little like some of the assembly instructions I had so cavalierly ignored in my model-making youth.
I soon mastered getting the thing to play its various beats, variations of beats and tones, etc., but when I hit the chapter entitled ‘The Operation of the Programmer Section’ I was stumped. To accomplish this, I finally worked out, I needed the ‘TS-1 accessory manual switch (sold separately)’. There’s always a fucking catch! It’s usually ‘Batteries not included’. While I was waiting for this elusive marvel to turn up from the hire company, I set about seeing what else the box could do.
Just lying around in the studio, there happened to be a beige-coloured synthesiser, an Oberheim Two Voice. Some Pink Floyd castoff, I guessed. I wasn’t then and to be perfectly honest I’m still not much of a keyboard player. I understand how synthesisers work and I love the sounds they make. But I’m no expert. But being inquisitive I like playing around with them and seeing what happens.
No one was looking so I switched it on and started knob twiddling and noise making. Following a diagram from the manual, I connected the drum box to the synth and pushed stop/start . . .
Fucking hell, it sounded brilliant! You could press keys on the synth and they would bubble away rhythmically in time with the drum box. It sounded fabulous. Then open and close the filter for dramatic effect. It was a eureka moment. It was that ‘Heart of Glass’/Giorgio Moroder-type sound. The sort of sound that makes you think, This’d make a good song.
‘Hey, listen to this!’
Bernard, with his own interest in synths, was impressed, very impressed. It wasn’t really what ‘Europop/Decades’ was crying out for but, all the same, it was something that had potential. Martin came in and cackled.
‘Have you figured it out yet?’
I had to admit that in all honesty I hadn’t. But the five magic beans I’d picked up were pretty handy ones.
Even with the black rubber stub of the TS1 accessory switch eventually connected, the CR-78 stuck resolutely to its samba, mambo, cha-cha-cha repertoire. It could not be persuaded to stray. It would not bend to my will or even Martin’s gift for charming recalcitrant technology. It was a dead loss on the programmability front, but it had provided an unforeseen insight into something though, so I could forgive its foibles.
‘There’s a new model coming out, maybe you should get that one instead,’ was the Hannett consolation.
I most certainly would and I wouldn’t let its manual beat me.
By this time everyone had cleared off to the pub or the chippy. Watching stoned men wrestle with technology is pretty much guaranteed to do that. It’s enough to make you cry with boredom.
Out came the big time-wasting guns – Martin got the ARP sequencer he’d brought down with him and had stashed behind the mixing desk, and we hooked it up to my SDS4 drum synth, stuck it through some delays and off we went, jamming away in the spirit of Kraftwerk. We knocked up the rambling electronic jam that became ‘As You Said’, almost universally acclaimed as ‘the worst Joy Division song ever’, an accolade indeed.
Synths were a much bigger part of Closer than Unknown Pleasures. I could go on about the joys of the ARP Omni-2 we’d bought around the time we recorded ‘Atmosphere’, but you would soon stop reading so I’ll confine myself to this list. The Omni was:
• Polyphonic – you could play more than one note at a time, i.e. chords;
• A synth that made lovely ethereal string-type sounds;
• A cool bass synth;
• An OK polysynth – bit nerdy that, sorry;
• Used on Low, so was obviously magnificent even to Ian.
I hope that didn’t hurt too much, because there’s one more list for the geeks: in electronic terms, by now we still had Bernard’s Transcendent, the Omni-2, Martin’s ARP 2600 with its sequencer, my SDS4 and trusty/rusty Synare, the AMS DMX 15-80, Martin’s new toy the Marshall Time Modulator, and a Lexicon Prime Time. The music biz term for this would be a ‘synth arsenal’. And Hooky still thought he was in a rock band. Hooky though wasn’t entirely missing out on the sonic exploration front. He’d got the Shergold six-string bass; this along with an Electro-Harmonix Clone chorus pedal would became a key part of his and Joy Division’s distinctive sound.
Bernard did all the keyboard playing. The piano riff that he came up with for ‘The Eternal’ was hauntingly brilliant. ‘Heart and Soul’ came out of Bernard playing a synth bass riff on the Omni, and was my first stab at a proper disco beat.
Ian still persevered in his battle with the Vox Phantom. On Closer, he played more guitar – ‘Incubation’ springs to mind – but in the studio it was often quicker for Bernard to play the parts. With Bernard playing synth on ‘Heart and Soul’ and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, the shy strummer would have to get his guitar out more often – however awkward.
By Martin’s standard there wasn’t THAT much drummer torture going on at Britannia Row. I was getting used to it by now anyway. Knowing what to expect and when always dulls the pain. But Martin could always surprise. Throw the unexpected curve ball.
‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ was an exquisite example of that. It was always the singles that Martin fucked about with most, agonised over.
We’d had a couple of attempts at recording LWTUA and Martin still disliked the beat I played, he wanted something more . . . Well, he wouldn’t say exactly what and the whole thing once again became a bit of a tug-of-war, a guessing game.
‘Bit simpler, Steve.’
‘Too simple, Steve.’
‘Almost.’
‘Not quite.’
‘Again . . . but not as . . .’
Again and again and again. The culmination of this ordeal was, when knackered and confused after days of trying every possible permutation of beats, I’d knocked off at the studio at around three a.m., driven all the way back to Baker Street, crawled into bed and finally laid my head on the pillow, when the phone rang . . . Bernard.
‘Hi Steve, can you come back? Martin wants you to redo the snare drum again.’
I was furious but, being the soft git that I am, I obeyed, got dressed and drove back up to Islington. There I angrily, very, very angrily, took out my rage on the drums. To this day I cannot listen to ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ without re-experiencing the fury I felt pounding that poor snare drum to within an inch of its life.
‘Fuck you, Hannett, you fucking bastard’ is all I can hear. To say there is some tension on that recording is a masterstroke of understatement.
‘Thanks, Steve,’ he whined sarcastically in my headphon
es. ‘Just once more.’
‘Fuck you, you cunt,’ I whined back.
This it seemed was exactly what Martin had been after.
Oh, how we laughed.
At some point during one of our many late-night attempts at improving the drumming on ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, the door buzzer went and the control room was invaded by a small group of young Irishmen. They sat courteously at the back and listened to the playback of the last take.
‘I’m not sure entirely what it is you’re doing, but it is very effective,’ said one of the recent arrivals. Turned out they were a band called U2. Whatever happened to them?
Britannia Row, with its Lignacite brick-lined control room, was described by one of its owners – Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters – as looking like a fucking prison. It did have a certain brutalist air and the bricks were a bit oppressive. You could see where the idea for The Wall came from. The studio equipment was all state of the art, though, and the big studio monitors sounded fantastic at maximum volume. A big plus was the plate of fresh sandwiches that greeted us every morning. Much more than we got in Stockport. The free use of Roger Waters’s full-sized snooker table in the huge recreation room made Strawberry’s coin-eating pool table look puny. Rob professed himself an expert snooker player and began to lose a fortune in marathon double-or-quits tournaments.
I had been a big fan of early Pink Floyd (well, everything up to Dark Side of the Moon). I loved their record sleeves – Hipgnosis’s designs were always great works of art. Very clever and a big influence on my ideas of what an album cover should be. In retrospect, there would be a lot of similarities in the Floyd’s career and our own: we would even copy some of their greatest mistakes. But that was way off in the future. For now I was happy listening to the house engineer Mike Johnson telling tales of Nick Mason’s car collection and the band’s ongoing studio battles.
At some point we took a few hours off from Britannia Row and went to visit Peter Saville to discuss ideas for the sleeve. This was the first time we’d done this. I’d only met Peter briefly once before as I was trying to herd the band into the car for the drive back from the Nashville. Peter had a neat and tidy minimal artist’s studio/office. He’d found some photographs of funereal stone statues that looked very interesting – black and white, moody and evocative. We all agreed they looked pretty impressive and record-sleeve-like and that was the main thing. We marked the ones we liked best and that was that – sleeve done. Easy as that.
What kept me going through this period, which in hindsight must have been a bit gruelling at times, was the anticipation of the next gig, writing the next song, making the next record, the trip to the USA that glittered tantalizingly on the horizon. As long as the momentum is pushing you ever onwards and upwards, the vigour of youth and optimism will take care of the rest.
This new album was going to be ‘the big one’. The songs were better, we were smarter musically and technically, and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ was a great ‘pop’ single. Whatever ‘pop’ is – maybe it was the inclusion of the word ‘Love’ that made it more pop?
Despite his at times unconventional approach, we all respected and trusted Martin. There were the inevitable disagreements, good-natured for the most part, with Rob playing devil’s advocate. Bernard and Hooky would get increasingly peeved as they both became more technically proficient – they were keen; they knew what they wanted; they had put up with Martin fucking up their sound on Unknown Pleasures; they didn’t want the same thing to happen again.
Of course, it did. Everyone hated what Martin did with his mix of Closer. Even before he’d finished mixing it, we wanted him to do nearly all of it again.
Ian was particularly disappointed this time. ‘It sounds shit, fucking shit.’
‘It sounds like Genesis,’ was Annik’s verdict
Martin, of course, refused point blank to even think about remixing anything. To him it was perfect.
Ian even wrote a letter to Rob expressing his misgivings about the sound of the record. It can be best summed up in three words:
Total.
Fucking.
Disaster.
Rob,
Judged purely on my own terms, and not to be interpreted as an opinion or reflection of mass media or public taste but a criticism of my own esoteric and elitist mind of which the mysteries of life are very few and beside which the grace of God has deemed to indicate in a vision the true nature of all things, plus the fact that everyone else are a sneaky, japing load of tossers, I decree that this LP is a disaster.
I K Curtis
What glum folk we were – but we were never happier than when we were moaning, like all the best musicians. We were becoming pros in many ways.
In light of what followed, it took me a long time – several years – before I could listen to Closer objectively. That had little to do with the songs, the recording or the mix; it was all down to the feelings that hearing the songs would bring back. The emotions that, unless you were there living them, are impossible to imagine.
To me, at that time, it felt like the future was opening up; but I got the feeling that for Ian it may been the other way around. That his options were narrowing.
At the Baker Street flat Ian and Annik continued their relationship, which had built up through the Buzzcocks and European tours.
It was an odd thing. They behaved like an old couple. A pair that had been married for years. It was very ‘proper’ and not in the least about sex – we did tease Ian about Annik a lot. Particularly Hooky and Rob with their ‘Fucking Yoko’ jibes. Annik was some sort of cultural muse, and to her Rob and the rest of us were naughty boys who should know better – savages. She sought to improve Ian by introducing him to vegetarianism, which was hilarious for us to watch for we knew how much he loved the baby lamb from the kebab shop around the corner from our flat.
It was a prime example of Ian’s trying-to-please-everybody act. It seemed to me his relationship with Annik was sometimes less the artist and his mistress and more some kind of mirror image of his home life with Debbie. Keeping both separate was getting more and more difficult and complicated for him as time went on.
People do like to talk about the time when there was an R & R Wives and Girlfriends weekend trip down to London during the recording of Closer. The story keeps getting dug up and with each telling I become more and more tardy and unreliable. I was meant to pick them all up from Euston, and according to one well-publicised account it was gone midnight when I turned up at the station. I could have sworn it was still light. Admittedly, I may have been a couple of hours late; anyway my name, as far as Gillian, Hooky’s girlfriend Iris and Rob’s partner Lesley were concerned, was something worse than mud. You’d think being a drummer I’d have had a better understanding of time and being in the right place and all that – certainly to collect Gillian, you’d think – but no. Still, I never said I was a proper taxi driver – even though I wouldn’t have minded becoming one. I bet you meet lots of interesting people that way.
The rest of the girlfriend invasion weekend was another awkward version of a bedroom farce. Debbie wasn’t there, but we still may have asked Annik to hide in the wardrobe. I can’t be certain, but I’m sure we thought it. It was inevitable that eventually something was going to give.
Shortly before Ian and Debbie split and Ian moved out of Barton Street, he called me and said he wanted to leave the band. He was going to move away to Holland with Debbie and Natalie and open a bookshop. Start a new life. He told me it was what he really wanted to do.
‘Well, if that’s really what you want,’ I said, ‘then you should do it.’
‘Yeah, I think I will.’
Thinking about it later, I got the feeling that he wanted me to say something different, more along the lines of ‘No, please don’t go, Ian. What about the band? What will we do without you?’ But if you really don’t want to do something and doing it only makes you unhappy, then really it’s better that you stop doing it, whatever it i
s. Unhappiness in bands is insidious and contagious. But it’s easy to talk about leaving, much harder actually to do.
Ian never mentioned this plan to another soul, not even to Debbie. I wonder what else he kept from others, and what he kept from me.
With the useless benefit of hindsight (yet again), I felt he didn’t really know what he wanted to do. One minute he was talking about this bookshop. The next he was thinking of leaving Debbie and Natalie and getting divorced. The next he was thinking of ending his relationship with Annik. I get the feeling he wanted to be told what to do but that was never going to happen – he wouldn’t listen anyway. It was the old catch-22.
I had a much simpler life.
No longer an office-based shirker, I’d found myself in the enviable situation of occasionally having spare time during the hours of daylight. Most of this I spent with Gillian. I would pick her up from Stockport college with a bulging folder of artwork stuck under her arm. We’d loiter in Disco One, my friend Simon’s record shop on Mill Street, listening to music and playing on the Space Invaders machine he’d stuck in the corner. Gillian would tut and roll her eyes as I scrounged another 10p from her in my futile pursuit of the high score. Macclesfield, in case you hadn’t noticed, is not a town noted for the wide range of glamourous rock-and-roll-type diversions. The daytime licencing hours were strictly observed and the place still ground to a complete halt on Wednesday afternoons. Once the ten pences ran out, Gillian would attempt to introduce me to the thrills of doing the family shopping. I found I was still a natural at sulking.
Straight after we finished Closer, Tony had arranged a series of nights (2, 3 and 4 April 1980) at the Moonlight Club as Factory showcase events. Three gigs in a row straight after recording an album might not have been the best of ideas as we were all a bit jaded and Ian was especially worn out. But troopers that we were, we didn’t want to let anyone down. Then an extra show – a benefit for the Strangler’s Hugh Cornwell, who had been given a prison sentence for possession – got shoehorned on to the final night. Two shows in one day was asking for trouble.
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