Frightened as we were of him, however, none of us could have predicted the extraordinary way in which he ended his teaching career at Salford Grammar. We were in maths one day when all of a sudden there was the sound of breaking glass coming from outside. We all ran over just in time to see chairs being thrown through the windows of the science teacher’s classroom and landing on the tarmac below. Our first thought was that he must have been in a particularly bad mood that day and caught someone laughing or something, but the truth was far worse.
First, he’d taken all the handles off the Bunsen burners so they were stuck open with no way of regulating the gas supply. Then he’d separated the Jewish kids in the class from the rest, sent the others out, locked the classroom door, gone into his little room and turned the gas on. What we were seeing and hearing were these poor kids throwing chairs through the windows so they could breathe. It was absolutely horrendous. Surprisingly, we never saw him again after that. I presume he was carried away in a straitjacket. The odd Holocaust incident aside, my time at Salford Grammar was similar in many ways to my time at St Clement’s. It was bigger than St Clement’s, so I found more like-minded kids and we drifted towards each other and became a group of no-good layabouts at the back of the class. One of these boys at the back was a lad called Peter Hook and I suppose, looking back, we must have met for the first time in the back row of a classroom at Salford Grammar. There was a group of us: Hooky, Terry Mason and Dave Pearce, who was a lovely guy whose father was a policeman (I believe Dave himself went on to become a police marksman). When we could get away with it, we’d while away boring lessons talking about girls and music, and when we couldn’t we’d just sit there bored, watching the clock and waiting for the lesson to finish. We were a bit like kids in The Inbetweeners in many ways: hopeless lost cases, but having a good time being hopeless lost cases. I remember one of my mates being very popular one day because he’d brought in a porn mag. They were very hard to get hold of in those days.
Another member of the back-row crowd was a mischievous lad called Gresty who had a particular classroom trick that ran very successfully for a long time. He kept a big spanner in his briefcase which, when the teacher wasn’t looking, he’d drop on the floor with an enormous clang, then he’d pick it up and shove it back in his bag before the teacher could see where the noise had come from. It took considerable skill and sleight of hand and was very impressive to witness. Of course, every show runs its course and Gresty eventually realized he needed some new material. One day we all filed into our maths lesson and slouched off towards the back row, but when we got there we saw that Gresty had parked himself at the front. We all looked at each other in horror. What on earth was he doing? Our maths teacher was called Johnny Barker, and he was another one we were very scared of. I think he’d been through the war and seen a few things. He hated the way we carried our books in satchels, for example, and he’d go off into a rant and say, ‘You’re ruining those books in those satchels, my mate went through the war so you could have those books.’ From there, he’d lose himself and spend the rest of the class telling us how we didn’t know how lucky we were, how his mate had had this terrible time in the war making sure we could have books, and there we were, ruining them by putting them in satchels. It was a bit strange, but fine by us, as it was less time spent on maths.
One feature of Mr Barker’s class was that he’d tell everyone to take out their homework then go from pupil to pupil checking it, starting with the lads at the front. We rarely did our homework – at least not our own: we’d occasionally copy someone’s in the toilets before the class – so what we’d try to do was distract him. The best way of achieving this was to get him talking about something he felt strongly about, and we soon narrowed this down to the war and cricket. One of us would put on our most innocent voice and ask something like, ‘Sir, what was it like in the war? Were Spitfires really as good as they were cracked up to be?’ or ‘Who’s the best team Lancashire ever had, sir?’ More often than not, he’d look out of the window and launch into a monologue about the versatility of the Spitfire or some great Lancashire county championship-winning side from the thirties, and the clock would tick by until the bell went and we’d get away with not doing our homework. Again. We really had it sussed.
But on this particular day Gresty had sat at the front, and none of us could work out what was going on: he was sure to be asked for his homework sitting right up there. Mr Barker, like Mr Upton, wouldn’t tolerate any misbehaviour in his class: there was no talking, no laughing; even smirking could land you in detention. Gresty knew this. We all knew it. The class started and Mr Barker was walking up and down talking about sines and co-sines or whatever. He walked past Gresty, who then sat back in his seat and put his hands behind his head in order that we could see that not only did he have his briefcase on his lap, but that it was rising and falling, apparently of its own accord. He’d summoned an erection and was using it to repeatedly levitate his briefcase. This was his new trick. It was a good one. And we couldn’t laugh.
Phallic gymnastics aside, the grammar school is largely responsible for some of my earliest musical influences – not from music lessons, but from the kids I hung out with. Also, we had one super-cool geography teacher, a young guy with long hair whose name I wish I could remember. He said to us, ‘Look, I know some of you might find geography boring. I understand that. But do me a favour, if that’s the case, just don’t cause any trouble in my class. If you don’t cause any trouble, there’s a room over there with my record player in it and you can go in there at break time and play records.’ He was great, a really cool guy, all the kids respected him. He was always asking what you were listening to, so we started bringing music in. He helped to foster a culture of music at the school away from the curriculum. I think the school was doing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat around that time, and it was just awful. We wanted nothing to do with it. We wanted to hear Jimi Hendrix, the Stones and The Kinks, not some kid murdering bloody ‘Any Dream Will Do’. We looked at things like Joseph and thought it was shit. If I remember rightly, most kids just sat through the music classes pretending to sing but with a porn mag tucked inside their music books.
I’d not grown up in any kind of musical atmosphere until that point. My grandparents had a gramophone, and they’d put on an old 78 now and again, but that didn’t do much for me. I’d heard The Kinks on the radio when I was very young and really liked them. I think it was when we were away on holiday and I’d hear transistor radios on beaches in Torquay or wherever we’d gone, a tinny rendition of ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘Lola’, or The Beatles or the Stones, and I remember thinking I really liked them. Then I’d hear on the news about their depraved behaviour – the drug busts and what have you. I distinctly remember hearing on the radio that a famous singer’s house had been raided and he’d been found in bed with not one but two girls. I was horrified. It didn’t put me off music, though.
At St Clement’s, the headmaster, Mr Alkister, would come in every morning with a record player and play us a different piece of classical music. He’d say, ‘Right, this is called “A Night on Bare Mountain” and it’s by a Russian composer called Mussorgsky,’ drop the needle, and we’d all sit there listening. I didn’t really understand it, but I often wonder whether it left some sort of subconscious imprint. However, I think classical music was too refined, too mature for a young Salford street kid’s mind at that stage. I’m not saying it was bad, it wasn’t that I didn’t like it, but I wanted to hear something thuggish like the Stones. You’d listen to the Stones and that would lead you on to something else, and eventually you’d be led back to classical music. But, at that age, I think we were too young to appreciate it.
North Salford Youth Club was a big musical influence too. Youth clubs back then were pretty good and the people were cool. Obviously, the main attraction was the opportunity to meet girls and hang out, and they had a disco that played Tamla Motown, soul and ska downstairs for all the sk
inheads, suedeheads and scooter boys, of which I was one. I owned a scooter when I turned sixteen, a GP225 Lambretta, which was a really cool scooter, as it happens, and I was wearing a crombie, the red silk handkerchief with a diamond stuck in it, two-tone trousers, all that gear. From the disco you’d drift to the upstairs part where the people with long hair gathered to play Led Zeppelin, Santana, the Stones and maybe Black Sabbath. They had a record player up there with stereo speakers, and we were all, ‘Fucking hell, this is amazing! The sound starts over there and moves across to the other speaker!’ You could take in your own albums and everyone would sit around listening: a group of like-minded people listening to similar music. I learnt a lot about music up there. As scooter boys, we were supposed to be listening to soul, but we liked rock music as well. We’d spend half the night downstairs in the disco and then move upstairs to be exposed to completely different styles of music.
When I was about fifteen I remember hearing ‘Ride a White Swan’ by T Rex on the radio and going straight out to buy it. I loved that track – the guitar sound, the tune, everything. I brought it home and put it on the record player I’d got for Christmas, and it sounded amazing. It finished after about three minutes and I thought right, what do I do now? OK, play the B side. I played the B side and didn’t really like it, so I kept on putting ‘Ride a White Swan’ on. After a while I thought, I can’t be doing with this, playing the same record over and over again, and went out to find the album of the music that had really opened my ears for the first time.
It might surprise you to learn this, but the first piece of music to really knock me sideways, the one that I can say probably more than most set me on the path that my life has taken, wasn’t one I heard downstairs at the youth club disco or upstairs with the rock fans. It didn’t come via one of those school break time sessions with the geography teacher’s record player and it didn’t come from the radio. Of all places, it came from the cinema.
I’d never seen anything like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly before and, what’s more, I’d never heard anything like it before. I’d been visually orientated from an early age and I loved the way the film looked: it was shot in a really peculiar way, with massive close-ups. I loved how it was ambiguous as to who the bad guy was, because everyone was bad, there was no good guy – up to that point it had been all corny John Wayne cowboy films, black hats and white hats, and then all of a sudden along came Sergio Leone to make these subversive films that broke all the rules. They were grittier than anything that had come before; you could see the sweat and the dust, almost feel the burning sun. The dialogue was pretty sparse, and great swathes of the film were made up of long silences.
Leone’s westerns were also strangely funny, they had this weird, dark humour about them, but what really blew me away was Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack. That simple whistle theme, the twangy guitar sound, the coyote howl of the vocal parts, the echo effects, the great spaces between the notes that made the music fit the bare, harsh location of the film perfectly, it was just so incredibly evocative, and I loved it. I came out of the cinema and immediately went hunting for the soundtrack album. Of course, there was no Internet then, so it took me a while to find it, but when I did – in HMV in Manchester, I think – I’d play it again and again. I also bought the soundtracks to A Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More, one LP with one film on each side, and I couldn’t stop listening to this incredible music. It was as if a switch had been flipped somewhere inside me from being not that interested in music to being massively interested in it.
It turned out that Hooky was just as interested in music as I was, and we’d usually be at one another’s houses playing records (we used to be at Gresty’s house quite a lot too, because his dad worked at Cadbury’s and could lay his hands on vast quantities of Flake cakes). We started going to the youth club together most of the time, me riding my scooter, with Hooky on the back. I remember one time, we thought we’d try and impress the girls standing around outside the youth club waiting to get in. Hooky climbed on the back, as usual, I revved the engine and the intention was to roar off up the grassy knoll outside the club like Salford’s own version of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, but the back wheel just started spinning around, the scooter shot from beneath us and we both ended up in a heap in this great big muddy puddle. Right in front of all these girls. Ouch.
I’m ashamed to admit a couple of us used to go to Manchester and do a bit of shoplifting now and then, mostly out of boredom. Jeans, mainly. Loads of kids did it. We couldn’t afford Levi’s or Wrangler’s but wanted to look cool when we went to the youth club. So, occasionally, we nicked them. That was about as far as the shoplifting went: it was the challenge as much as any real criminal intent. It didn’t last, though – there was a pen-nicking competition once, and I got caught with one by a bloke who said that if I didn’t put it back he was taking me to the management. After that, I never nicked anything ever again. For one thing, my mother would have murdered me. The potential consequences just weren’t worth it.
Girls and clothes aside, by my mid-teens it was all about music. It was like a box had been opened and out of the box came this very strong light, and that light was music. We became fanatical about it, Hooky and I. I don’t know if it was because we found everything else boring at school or it happened to be a particular period in time when there was a lot of good music around, but it fascinated us to the point of obsession.
One big event while I was still at school was when Jimi Hendrix died in 1970. I liked guitar music, but I couldn’t find much of a tune in Jimi’s stuff. I sat next to this lad who was generally quiet, kept himself to himself, and I said, ‘You like Jimi Hendrix, don’t you? He’s just died, hasn’t he?’ ‘Yeah, yeah I do,’ he replied. I said, ‘I’ve tried to get into his stuff, but I can’t find the tune in it – what’s it all about?’ He turned round, looked me in the eye and said, quite calmly, ‘I just like it. All right?’ I thought this was a strange reaction, and it made me even more curious. Polydor released an EP when Hendrix died with ‘Voodoo Chile’, ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and ‘Hey Joe’ on it. I put it on the record player and listened to it, and the first couple of times I thought it was just a noise. I couldn’t work out what people saw in it. But then, pow! Suddenly, I heard it. It took me a while, but thank you, whoever you were who wouldn’t give me an explanation that day at Salford Grammar, because you made me keep at it until it just clicked.
I used to like early Fleetwood Mac too, particularly Peter Green’s songwriting and guitar playing. Not so much the bluesy stuff, though. It always confused me how British bands would bang on and on about the blues. I didn’t like the tracks they released that sounded like the blues, I liked the ones that sounded like they were a band from England – the songs they wrote when they weren’t trying to be a blues band from America. I remember having a Rolling Stones album with an octagonal cover, Through the Past, Darkly, it was called, and it had all the hits, ‘Jumping Jack Flash’, ‘Street Fighting Man’: I loved that stuff. ‘2000 Light Years From Home’ in particular was a great track, because it didn’t sound like a blues band, it just sounded like The Rolling Stones. Obviously, there are and were some great original American blues artists out there, but the stuff I liked wasn’t the blues, it was when a band had ingested the blues and something completely different was coming out; they’d filtered it through their own experiences and environments. That’s what worked best for me, and still does.
Certainly the music I’ve made has been the product of the experiences I’ve had. And, as I moved into my late teens, those experiences were coming thick and fast.
Chapter Three
Complex
Even after we’d moved to the flat across the river in Greengate, I was still spending most of my time back at Alfred Street. It was like a magnet to me; I’d always be over there visiting my grandparents and hanging out with my friends. I certainly wouldn’t say I had a miserable childhood; it was a difficult childhood in many wa
ys, certainly compared to some people’s, but it definitely wasn’t miserable.
I loved growing up in Salford. I really felt part of the community there, felt that I belonged. I had a lot of fun too, some fantastic times. My horizons didn’t extend far beyond a few local streets, and I knew every inch of them. Sometimes we’d get out on the scooters to the Pennines, the moors, Blackpool, wagging school and just taking off. When I first saw the countryside, it was like a different world. Our world was red brick, dirt and dust. But on our scooters we’d drive out even in the middle of winter, through the Pennines in snow and fog on these little scooters with twelve-inch wheels, no crash helmets or anything. It was completely insane. But, again, there was a strange kind of youthful innocence about it all. If you were walking at night you had to have your wits about you and be a bit streetwise, you had to think about where you were going and who with, because you wouldn’t want to walk into the wrong mob at the wrong time, or you’d get leathered. There were a few psychos about, people with sharpened umbrellas, hammers and, on the odd occasion, swords and that kind of thing, but you’d just try and avoid the loons.
Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me Page 4