So I started getting a bit restless, despite the fact I loved the people, especially an animator called Graham Garside. There was also a grumpy guy called Keith. You’d say good morning to him and he’d just look at you and not reply. He said to me one day, ‘Look at you, dead skinny. One day you’ll wake up, get out of bed and you’ll have a gut, you mark my words.’ It was such a horrible thing to say it actually made me laugh, but, well, he was right: that’s exactly what happened. We made the tea for him, and he liked it really strong so we’d get a rotten old pair of socks, hoick a couple of old teabags out of the bin, put them in the socks, say, ‘Do you want a brew, Keith?’, squeeze this sock juice into a cup and give it to him.
Outside work, my time – and money – was mainly spent on music and my scooter. There wasn’t really much to do in Salford back then; it was a pretty closed community and you didn’t leave very often. Occasionally, we’d venture a bit further: a load of scooter boys would go on a trip to Blackpool or Southport, for instance. Once, when I was about seventeen, a little group of us went all the way down to Brighton. I ended up being caught by the police, because I didn’t have a tax disc. My grandfather, God bless his soul, had lent me £175 to buy my Lambretta, which was a lot of money in those days, and I was really proud of it (and proud of the fact that I paid my grandfather back out of my wages). He’d also given me £10 to buy a tax disc for it, but I didn’t, I bought an album instead, Argus by Wishbone Ash, who I’d never heard of before but bought on the off-chance. I took it home and found I didn’t like it at all, but when I took it back to the shop they wouldn’t return my money. So I’d spent my road-tax money on an album I didn’t like and, to add insult to injury I was stopped by the police on my scooter with L plates on and a girl on the back. And no road tax, of course, which meant I didn’t have any insurance either. I got the book thrown at me for that one. I think I had a helmet on, but that was the only thing about the entire scenario that was legal and the police weren’t very understanding.
A couple of years later, Peter Hook got a scooter and we started hanging around with other scooter boys. We’d race around Salford precinct, a concrete monstrosity of a shopping centre, and would often end up being pulled over by the police. They’d stop you on the flimsiest of premises and then try to extract inform ation from you about local criminals – ‘We’ll let you off if you tell us about so-and-so’ – but, even if we knew anything, we never grassed.
It was around this time that we started going to gigs. This came about mainly through Terry Mason, another friend from the back row of the grammar school who would go on to play several roles in the Joy Division and New Order stories and distinguish himself by not being particularly good at any of them. Terry was a misfit like us. He was all right, Terry, quite a harmless character, not particularly brilliant at any one thing, so we tried him in various roles to keep him involved and in the hope we could find something he was reasonably good at. We tried him as a drummer in the very early days of Joy Division. His mum bought him a drum kit, but it was about the worst drum kit on the planet – the legs were as thin as knitting needles and the kit would walk away from him as he was playing, leaving him on his stool reaching out after it. He looked more like a water-skier than a drummer. It didn’t help that he was a terrible drummer, even for a punk band. He had no sense of rhythm and would just make a terrible racket.
Terry looked like a cross between the Gestapo officer from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Alan Carr, the comedian. I thought he was a funny guy – though his jokes were pretty disgusting, you couldn’t help but laugh. Back in those early days, though, he was pretty well up on gigs, mainly because he used to read the music press, and we didn’t. He’d spot gigs coming up that he thought we should go to and, usually, he was pretty spot on.
Sometimes the venues would turn out to be student places and we wouldn’t get in because you had to have a student card, and often they wouldn’t let us into gigs because we looked like skinheads even though we were suedeheads really. The Students’ Union on Oxford Street would never let us in because we didn’t look like hippies. It became frustrating, because all the bands back then only played at the universities and colleges. They obviously thought we were scum and, well, we were.
One place we could get into was the Free Trade Hall, and one of the first gigs I remember is seeing Lou Reed there in 1974. I was a big fan; I loved his solo stuff. I got into Transformer, his live album, Rock and Roll Animal, and Berlin before I’d even heard the Velvet Underground. I think this was the Sally Can’t Dance tour, and I was really looking forward to seeing him live. The band came on and started playing ‘Sweet Jane’ and I was thinking about how great it was going to be when Lou himself finally came on. Then this short-arse guy with blond hair started singing, and I thought, that can’t be Lou Reed, can it? But it was.
He was off his chump – really off his chump; he kept smashing microphones one after the other – but it was a fantastic concert, and the audience was really up for it. I guess in a way this was my first punk gig, but I didn’t know it. They finished the set with a storming ‘Goodnight Ladies’ and trooped off. Everyone expected them to come out for an encore, but the stage remained resolutely empty and the crowd began to grow restless. I was near this guy who looked like a Rod Stewart clone and he lobbed this beer bottle from about five hundred yards, with phenomenal accuracy, straight through the skin of the bass drum. And that was it. Pandemonium. People swarming on to the stage, getting into fights with the roadies and security, everything. Lou Reed never came back to Manchester after that, all because of one bloke with a dodgy haircut and incredible aim.
Hooky liked Deep Purple. I wasn’t so sure, but we ended up with tickets to see them, and off we went. I remember having a bad tooth abscess at the time but I was talked into going. It’s never a good idea going to see a band with a tooth abscess, but it’s even worse when it’s a band you’re not that keen on. There was one song where the singer was screaming higher and higher as the song went on – ‘Child In Time’, I think it was – and my tooth was throbbing away as if his voice was actually pulling at the nerve. It was agony. There were quite a few knobheads in the audience as well, and the whole experience was doing my head in.
At one point the keyboard player was immersed in an interminable prog-rock solo about twenty minutes long, my tooth was agony, and I was thinking, This is really fucking shit, it’s too loud and my tooth’s killing me. I was feeling properly sorry for myself when, in the middle of this endless solo, the keyboardist started playing ‘I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’, as if it was some kind of witty aside. I thought, Ok, he’s having a bit of a joke, that’s quite funny then another ten minutes went past and he went into the theme from Coronation Street. At that point I thought, ‘He’s fucking taking the piss out of us, the soft southern — I bet he’s from London!’ That was the last straw. I walked out. We ended up playing with Deep Purple in France a few years ago. They’d cut their solos right down.
Santana at the Hardrock Hall in Stretford was another memorable gig. It was November 1972 and I’d never been to see a big American group like that before. I loved the sound of Carlos Santana’s guitar and I really liked the way he played, so it was a gig I was pretty excited about. But at that stage he’d just entered his jazzy, metaphysical phase – his album Caravanserai had just come out – and he came on and said, ‘I’d like to begin with a few moments’ meditation,’ Meditation. In Stretford, south Manchester. He put his hands together, bowed his head and just stood there in silence. Naturally, this didn’t really go down too well with a crowd of Mancunian music fans who’d already enjoyed a few pints. ‘Fucking get on with it’ was about the politest comment that broke the meditative silence.
The Buxton Festival, out in the Derbyshire hills, was another one that stood out. Me, Hooky and a couple of scooter boys headed over there, only to find the field packed with Hells Angels. We thought we were in trouble, a bunch of short-haired lads at what was basically a long hair event,
but we didn’t get any hassle.
Family were on when we arrived, and I was really impressed with them because they looked as though they were completely off their faces. I thought, That’s fucking great, they just don’t give a shit. Wishbone Ash were on the bill too, the architects of my tax-disc downfall. They ended up as headliners, when Curved Air refused to go on because it was too cold. The Argus album I hadn’t liked had really taken off for Wishbone Ash, so I thought I’d give them another go – but I still thought it was a load of twaddle.
The main thing I remember about that night is a spectacular meteor shower. Out there in the hills, there was no light pollution, so we probably had the best view in the country. There was a huge canopy of stars above our heads with specks of light flinging themselves across the sky and disappearing. They played the Doctor Who theme through the PA, which made the whole thing pretty wacky. I was awestruck; I sat there looking up, my mouth hanging open, absolutely enchanted. It probably sounds a bit naive now, but I’d never been to a festival before, let alone seen a meteor shower. I thought it was amazing.
For all the celestial fireworks, ill-conceived mass meditation workshops and dead-eye bottle throwing, however, there was to be one gig that has come to be remembered above all the others. A gig that has, for better or worse, been analysed, mythologized and proselytized probably more than any other concert in the history of music. It was a gig that many identify as one that changed everything.
And I was there.
Chapter Five
Rebellion
One day early in the summer of 1976 Terry Mason showed us a copy of the New Musical Express and started gushing about this new band he’d been reading about called the Sex Pistols. ‘They keep getting in fights and being canned off,’ he said. ‘They sound great, just the kind of thing we’d like.’ He’d found out they were playing at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 4 June so off we went, me, Hooky, Terry and a couple of others. There weren’t many people there at all – I’ve heard people say the crowd was about forty – but it’s become such a milestone of Manchester musical heritage that if everyone who’s claimed they were there had actually been, they’d fill Old Trafford.
It was still early days for the Pistols; they were just about to properly break, and certainly in Manchester nobody really knew who they were. They sounded worth seeing, though, so we wandered up and paid our fifty pences to Malcolm McLaren, who was on the door, on the till and on the make, and went in, not really sure what to expect.
It’s an occasion that’s gone down in history, as much for the people who were in the audience as the gig itself: Mark E. Smith was there, so was Morrissey, so were Tony Wilson and Paul Morley, and the gig had been arranged by Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto of the Buzzcocks. I wasn’t really bothered about who else was there: once the band came on and started playing I was too blown away to worry about who was in the crowd. From the moment they swaggered on to the stage, picked up their instruments and launched into ‘Did You No Wrong’, I knew that this was something different. It was their attitude that hit me; there was a real spite in their performance, sheer aggression combined with an indifference to the audience that occasionally bordered on outright contempt. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before; it was along the lines of Lou Reed’s anarchic performance at the Free Trade Hall, but about as far from Santana’s call to meditation as you could possibly imagine. This was something special.
For the first time at a live performance I found I could truly identify with and relate to the people on the stage. We’d had the same kind of ‘fuck authority’ attitude ourselves since we were at school, this underlying resentment at being told what to do all the bloody time and how to behave. At school it was the teachers, and when we left school it was the need to fit into a preordained role in a society that I didn’t feel a part of. At every turn there seemed to be older people telling us what to do and being quick to remind us how shit we were. Then the Sex Pistols came along and made us feel we were right. Not only that, they showed us that we’d been right all along. Punk was something giving us a voice for the first time, and that voice was screaming at the top of its lungs there right in front of me. It justified our outlook and at the same time made us feel we were worth something after all.
That night has developed a mythology of its own over the last thirty-odd years. Rock ’n’ roll had begun as something raw and simple, but by the mid-seventies it had become largely about people showing off. Before the Pistols and the other punk bands came along, music seemed like a private members club that belonged increasingly to virtuosos. A great deal – but not all – of the music around at that time was overblown, self-indulgent, bloated nonsense. Prog rock was the main culprit, and it seemed to have stifled music, smothering it beneath a thick layer of concepts, capes and navel-gazing noodling that was far too pleased with itself for its own good.
I’d been a very young kid in the sixties, listening to the Stones and The Beatles, The Animals, The Kinks, etc. etc., bands who played great songs and had great guitar sounds. The whole was always greater than the individual for those bands, but by the mid-seventies a lot of music had taken a turn for the pompous. There was a cult of cleverness: you had bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes, with their interminable concept albums, which were the antithesis of everything I liked about music.
Punk and the Pistols blew a sneering path right through the middle of all that puffed-up musical pomposity. They arrived at exactly the right time, with exactly the right attitude. As we stood in that sticky-floored room at the top of the Free Trade Hall watching a group of lads who seemed a bit like us but belting out this wall of sheer attitude, it confirmed that we were not alone, that there were others out there who felt the way we did. I suppose I must have had an inkling that this wasn’t going to be just another gig, because I took along a cassette player and recorded it (when I took it home and played it back, though, it was completely distorted – it could have been my rubbish tape recorder, or maybe the Pistols just sounded like that …) but, either way, something resonated with us. Whether it was a completely new revelation or whether it had just nourished something already planted is hard to say. But there was something in the air that summer, and we’d caught a whiff of its heady, sweaty aroma.
Sometimes I think people make a bit more of the significance of that night than was probably the case. The way I look at it is this: there was at that time a movement called punk that struck a chord with a lot of people, just like later there was a movement called acid house that would do likewise. We’d go to punk concerts because that was what was happening, the same as we’d later go to acid-house nights. It was a great experience, there’s no doubt about that, and the Pistols obviously went on to be really influential. The fact there were certain people in the audience that night who went on to do certain things makes it a good story, but has a wider context been grafted on to it in later years by people who weren’t even there? To me, it wasn’t exactly a shaft-of-sunlight-from-the-heavens moment, as some have made out, but it was certainly inspirational, and there is a subtle difference.
I think the mythology that’s grown up around that gig needs a certain amount of focus. Punk was an interesting, exciting new movement of which a few people in Manchester were aware through the music press and certain people attended that concert as a result. I’d seen the Buzzcocks before I saw the Sex Pistols – they had some great songs and they were also an influence on us and should certainly not go unmentioned just because that Pistols gig has become such a cultural touchstone.
I believe some people can pick up on a kind of zeitgeist, and that zeitgeist is the catalyst for the release of their creativity or expression. I don’t think it’s a conscious thing; it’s not learnt behaviour but something else, something instinctive. There are different ways in which a person can acquire knowledge: going to school, listening to the teachers and writing down everything they say, learning by rote being the traditional way. But there is another way, and it evolv
es through observing the world and making up your own mind based on what you experience; absorbing the things that are right for you and interpreting them, filtering them through your own perception and learning how and when to trust your instincts. That’s how I discovered and explored music and how I developed my influences in order to create it myself.
Punk had become the main focus of our cultural lives during that summer of 1976. We liked the anti-authoritarian aspect of it, but one thing people often forget about punk is that one of its primary messages was not to take yourself too seriously. Yes, rail against the system, but remember to have a laugh while you’re doing it. You’re young, you should be enjoying yourself despite all the shit you have to put up with. There was a fantastic energy in the music, like nothing I’d ever heard. At that age, in your teens and your early twenties, you’re brimming with energy and need an outlet for it. Punk gigs were perfect; you could just go crazy: it was as much like going to a party as being at a gig. It was similar to acid house in that way, only without the drugs. Well, maybe different drugs.
From a childhood that had featured very little in the way of music, I’d had the most tremendous adolescent crash course. It was as if I’d been moving quickly up through the gears musically, and punk saw me changing up to fifth. In the aftermath of the Pistols gig I looked at the abandoned guitar my mother had bought me years earlier in a new light. Now I’d heard punk, suddenly it had a purpose beyond just standing in the corner of my room gathering dust and being handy for hanging clothes on. So one night I closed my bedroom door, sat on the bed, blew off some of the dust, opened the ‘how to play a guitar’ book I’d bought and set about learning to play.
Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me Page 6