Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  Salford was my world. You’d make the most of what you had, the best of what you’d got. You wouldn’t know there was anything better. I didn’t know what else was out there and, in many respects, it didn’t matter: I had the magnetic pull of my family, so there was never any question of leaving, and it was such an intense period of my life that I have vivid recurring dreams about those days even today, what, forty-odd years later. These were some of the happiest times of my life and the reasons for that are family, community, friends, a sense of place and a wonderful lack of responsibility.

  But, as I was about to find out, nothing lasts for ever. I remember coming home from school one day and finding a national newspaper on the table, one of the London ones, open at a page dominated by a big article about ‘Britain’s biggest slum’. I picked it up and started reading. The thrust of the piece was how Britain was home to the largest and worst slum in Europe, an eyesore, a place of which the nation should be ashamed, and as I read on I saw that this terrible place, this blight on Britain, was Salford. I thought, Hang on a minute, that’s where I live. I don’t live in a slum. I felt really insulted, not to mention confused, because, as far as I was concerned, this was a good place to live. They obviously measured things in a different way down south.

  Before long, the council began getting rid of parts of this alleged eyesore and plans were put into action to take people out of the old Victorian streets and rehouse them in new tower blocks. From their point of view, it was cheaper to put everyone in a tower block than to renovate the old Victorian terraces, put central heating and proper bathrooms into the houses, which they could easily have done, as most of the houses had a third bedroom. They decided to just pull everything down and shove everyone into these human beehives. The architects thought only in terms of concrete and La Corbusier, not community. Why would they?

  If that wasn’t unsettling enough, it was around this time that more things began to go wrong in the health department at home. One day, my granddad had what the doctors said was a stroke; something that affected him mentally as well as physically. Looking back now, maybe it was something to do with his brain tumour, but where, before, he’d been a kind, thoughtful man, suddenly he was angry, roaring and shouting all the time.

  And of course my grandmother was blind. She was upstairs in the house; my grandfather now slept downstairs. It was a terrible situation, because my grandfather had gone out of his mind and now my grandmother had him to cope with as well as her blindness.

  It was heartbreaking, and there was nothing I could do. I remember being at the house in Alfred Street, looking around and thinking, This is the place where I grew up, where I’ve spent my happiest days, and suddenly everything is going so wrong. The council was moving people out of the street whether they wanted to leave or not, and boarding up the houses as they went, gradually turning it into a ghost street, with desolation and abandonment creeping along it house by house. The community was being scattered across the region, to the likes of Swinton and Little Hulton, places that had just been names to us before. It was being torn apart with no consultation, nothing: no one had any say; no one had any choice. Where once the street was full of the noise of kids playing and the hubbub of neighbourly conversation, now it was quiet save for the hammering of the council workmen boarding up the windows and doors of the empty houses. Before long, there were just three houses on the street still occupied; the rest were all dark, soulless and home only to ghosts and memories. In one of these last three houses to still have a light burning in the window were my grandmother, completely blind, and my grandfather, out of his mind. To this day I have a recurring dream where I see the street all boarded up and my grandmother in the house in despair, tears running down her face. Even now in this dream I feel completely helpless. I was only young at the time and I didn’t know how to help. My grandparents had effectively brought me up and shown me nothing but love and kindness my whole life, and here I was unable to do anything to stop this tide of change and misery that was swamping them. I watched this wonderful, vibrant community that I’d thought would last for ever reduced to nothing, the people knitted together by that binding sense of community thrown to the winds.

  I’d really believed that everyone would live there for ever; that there’d always be Bonfire Nights and the Pinks getting into scrapes, the old women in their chairs soaking up the sunshine and my granddad filling his lungs twice a day in the backyard. All of it had been wiped out in a sudden flurry of class-based cleansing, one that I suppose was well intentioned but was actually entirely disconnected from reality.

  Eventually, my grandfather was moved into hospital, which was a blessing, but he lived only another six months. This left my grandmother living with one of her sisters in this desolate street, no more than two other houses on the street still occupied. Finally, they moved my grandmother to a sheltered housing place in Swinton, which she hated. She didn’t want to move out of the house where she’d lived for nigh on fifty years; a house that in her mind’s eye was still the same domestic haven it had been when she still had her sight.

  I remember going to visit her in the old house in Alfred Street towards the end, and there were mice and she didn’t know because she couldn’t see them. We’d never had mice; she’d always kept everything scrupulously clean. It was just horrific, an image that summed up what had become of the community as a whole. Once the last residents had left, all the history, people, families, homes, pride, dignity – everything – had gone and been left to the mice.

  I was barely eighteen years old, and everything I’d ever known had been destroyed.

  Witnessing this had a big psychological impact on me; it made me a bit hard emotionally. That was the only way I could deal with it: to harden my heart. I imagine it’s a bit like being a doctor – they have to be quite hard in a way, because they see awful things and have to break a lot of bad news to people. It’s either that or you just completely crumble. That was the choice I faced as I watched the disintegration of our world.

  Everything had gone; even the school had been pulled down. It was almost as if someone was actively trying to erase my memories. All the parts you could touch, feel, even smell, they were all gone and would never come back. My transition from childhood hadn’t exactly been gentle: I was wrenched from it and dragged into adulthood before I was ready, and I didn’t like it. Suddenly everything had become really fucking serious and I’d had to grow up fast. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is when I got even more into music, because what happened around that time has really influenced the music I’ve made. I think you can hear the death of a community and the death of my adolescence in my contribution to the music of Joy Division.

  Chapter Four

  Scumbags

  I left school in 1972 with an O level in English and a grade A O level in art. I wanted to go on and do something with art, because it was what I loved doing most of all. I was mad about music of course, yet hadn’t really thought about making my own at this stage. As well as the record player, my mother had also bought me an electric guitar – I don’t know why I’d asked for it, but I’d always loved the sound of the guitar, so the logical thing was to get one – and I’d made a few token attempts to play it. To be honest, I just found it all a bit aimless: I didn’t know where to go with it. So it was left it in the corner of the room, where it became coated in dust. That was dead end number one.

  So, fresh out of school at sixteen, art was the direction in which I wanted to go. The careers officer at Salford Grammar was hopeless. I went to see him and told him I’d really like to do something involving art, and he thought for a moment before announcing there were two jobs for me. One was working in a hairdresser’s; the other was cutting the white borders from around photographs. And that was dead end number two.

  It looked as though working at anything creative was out of the question, and I was under pressure from my mother to find a job in order to start bringing some money into the household. I had applied
to Bolton College of Art when I left school, as it had a good reputation, and I was absolutely delighted when I was offered a place. However, when I told my mother, she didn’t seem exactly enthusiastic about it and, the next thing I knew, an uncle from Jimmy’s side of the family I didn’t know very well had come round to the flat to have a little chat with me. He sat me down and explained that the family couldn’t afford for me to go to art college, I should forget about it and concentrate on getting a steady job. I understood the situation, because we clearly didn’t have much money, but I was pretty upset. Maybe Mr Strapps had been right after all. And thus I arrived at dead end number three.

  My mother knew a local councillor, who secured me a job interview at Salford town hall, as a result of which I joined the ranks of the gainfully employed. I didn’t know what I’d be doing, but at least it was a job, and there weren’t exactly a surfeit of those in the mid-seventies. I worked in the treasury department, where my role was to send out rates bills, folding the bill, putting it in an envelope, taking a roller and some water and sticking the envelope down. Over and over again, thousands of times a week. Our office was in the town hall itself, and it had an enquiries window where members of the public would come and moan about their bills. Nobody liked dealing with their queries, so I had to do it. Another part of my job was to take the city treasurer his coffee in the morning. He’d have a pot of hot coffee and a pot of hot milk and I’d have to take it in and pour it for him.

  A lot of the people working in our office had been doing the same job for forty years and were bored out of their heads. It was a slow death really. There was one guy who always fell asleep at his desk after lunch. One day, some bright spark put the clock forward to five thirty, and we all started making a load of noise and pretending to put our coats on like we were packing up for the day.. The commotion woke the guy up with a start and he shot off out of the door and went home.

  I’d not been working there very long when a weird guy turned up at the window wearing these old-fashioned Victorian-style clothes, head to toe in black and pissed out of his brains. Everyone who sat near the window hid. There was one guy in the office who was actually all right; he looked just like Terry-Thomas, waxed RAF moustache and all. He had a bit of spirit about him, despite the tedium of the job. He called me over and whispered, ‘You’ll have to deal with him, he’s the city coroner. He comes in with a list of the bodies he’s dealt with and we pay him his cash and he spends it all on booze.’ He was half propped up at the window, this coroner, effing and blinding and saying, ‘Look here, I cut eight bodies up this week, I’ve come for my money. If I don’t get it, you’ll be the next one.’ Everyone was shit scared of this guy, so they pushed me to the window. I gave him his money then told him to fuck off. After the door had closed behind him. Well, I was only sixteen and a half.

  I can’t remember his name, the Terry-Thomas guy, but he was a really nice man. He had a Volkswagen camper van, one of those cool ones, and the odd lunchtime about five of us would pile into it and go swimming at Broughton Baths. He was the only guy in the place with a bit of life in him, he was funny – in fact, I’m sure it was him who’d turned the clock forward that day.

  I had a very weird dream about him after I’d left that job. In it I’d gone back to the office and was looking through the enquiries window at him. He had his back to me and I was knocking on the window and calling his name, but he didn’t turn round. I kept shouting until eventually he turned to face me, and all the veins and sinews of his face were on the outside. It looked terrible, really horrific. I woke up thinking what a horrible dream it was. A little bit later I was in a nightclub in Manchester and I bumped into a couple of guys that still worked there, and they told me he’d died in a crash in his Volkswagen camper. It was awful news to hear at the best of times, and it gave me a strange feeling in the light of that dream.

  It was a really odd place to work – a cul-de-sac of life, in a sense. These were people who’d stepped off the highway of their lives to be content in this quiet, unhurried dead end of existence, counting the years down until retirement. There was one guy who worked in town planning (so was probably one of those responsible for pulling down my grandmother’s house). Every now and again he’d come up to me all furtive and say, ‘I’ve got a letter, can you post it through the franking machine for me?’ When I’d done it, he’d go, ‘Good lad, here’s a sweet for you,’ and I’d get a sweet for doing it. Local government corruption, eh?

  I was called into the deputy city treasurer’s office once. He was actually all right too: he sat me down and said, ‘Bernard, you’re new to this job, aren’t you? How long have you been here?’ I replied that it was four or five months, whatever it was. He paused for a moment, looked me up and down, nodded at the wall and said, ‘Look at that painting. Do you know what it is?’

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘It’s Whistler’s Mother,’ he said, then paused and looked at his feet for a while, as if he didn’t relish what he was about to say to me.

  ‘It … it’s just the clothes you wear,’ he said. I had a Fair Isle jumper on – they were kind of cool in those days – and a budgie shirt under it.

  ‘How can I put this?’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t go to a funeral dressed as you are now, would you?’ I replied that, no, I wouldn’t go to a funeral dressed as I was. In a slightly pained tone of voice he said, ‘Well, why do you come to work dressed like that?’

  The funeral analogy was quite apposite for that office, and I wonder if it was a comparison he’d made deliberately, as if to say, Look, I know what it’s like, but we’re all just trying to get on with it here while causing as few ripples as possible. The relevance of the painting, I still wonder about to this day.

  It was a curious place – a bit like working in the clerk’s office in A Christmas Carol, especially when the coroner came round in his strange Victorian clothes with his breath smelling of embalming fluid. I knew I had to get out, and I think the final straw came when they sent me to college to study local and central government. It was like being at school all over again: we’d learn about things like Hansard and how all the bureaucracy worked, and I wasn’t in the slightest bit interested. Predictably, I did really badly in the exam. Here we go again, I thought, and that was the cue for me to get out. I stuck it out for a year in all and must have done a quarter of a million of those envelopes in that time, none of which was ever good news for the people receiving them.

  I wrote to loads of advertising agencies in Manchester, because they were the only places with any scope for anything to do with art back then. I went for a few interviews and was offered two jobs at the same time. Both were for less money than I was on at the town hall, but that didn’t really matter: I just wanted to do something I could put a bit of heart into. I told one company I could start immediately and the other I could start a couple of weeks later, at which point I’d throw a sickie at the first one and decide which job I preferred. So I went to the first one, and it was just fucking horrible, doing those terrible adverts you see in newspapers – ‘10% off NOW!’ inside a big star – and I thought, This isn’t art, it’s just toss. I stuck it for about a week.

  The second place was called Greendow Commercials, and they did TV adverts, including the TV Times commercials. There was a connection with Granada Television too; most of the people working there had been graphic artists at Granada but had gone freelance and then moved here. They had a film editing suite, a rostrum camera and a sound dubbing suite, so just about everything was done in-house. I was employed as a runner and my boss was a guy called Simon Bosanquet, the nephew of Reginald Bosanquet, the newsreader. He was all right – he’d made a pop video for Bryan Ferry, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, of which he was very proud. All the people were great there; I really liked it. They were all creative types, and there was a much better atmosphere than at the job I’d endured at the town hall. I think I’d only really got this one because I had the scooter (I was a runner, so I had to drop films
off to people around Manchester), but I certainly wasn’t complaining. They were really into music there; you could play music all day on a record player. A lot of people – not all of them – would moan when I put mine on, saying, ‘How can you listen to that shit?’, but they were all older than me.

  I hadn’t been there very long when we received the bad news that the place was shutting down. We were called in to see the boss, a guy called Gerry Dow, and he said they were sorry but for one reason or another the place was going bust. However, they were planning on starting up something new soon and would be in touch. The two deputy bosses were called Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall, and they were really good to me. I was on about ten pounds a week at the time, and they very kindly kept me on at eight quid a week to go up to their house and do odd jobs – helping out in the garden, that kind of thing – until they got the new company going.

  Despite Greendow closing, Thames Television in London were keen to keep using part of the old department, so Mark and Brian were going to set up a new company in Chorlton. Sure enough, about six to eight months after the demise of Greendow, they set up Cosgrove Hall Animation, and I became a filler on kids’ cartoons like Jamie and the Magic Torch, painting the colours on to the cells after they’d been drawn by the animators. It was definitely a step up from being a runner, but not having an art qualification higher than my O level did hold me back a bit. Everyone at Cosgrove Hall had been to art college except me, so I was always going to be behind in the pecking order. I liked the job, but it was very repetitive and, aware I couldn’t really progress any further, I grew bored. I signed up for art classes at night school and, as usual, I turned up late for the first one. I opened the door and rushed in, and there in the middle of the room was a completely naked middle-aged woman, surrounded by people with easels. Everyone looked at me; I looked at everyone, I looked at the model; she looked at me and my jaw dropped. I hadn’t expected that at all. Either way, it didn’t really help me with graphic art and animation, which is what I needed to learn. I asked Cosgrove Hall if I could go on day release to college, but they said they couldn’t really stretch to that.