Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  It wasn’t an auspicious start: the first pages of the book gave instructions on how to tune the guitar, but I didn’t know which way was up and which was down. I didn’t have the most finely honed ear at that stage anyway, so the noises I was making must have sounded pretty horrible. But I kept at it, because music had become the biggest thing in my life. I’d listened to it, I’d bought it, I’d watched people playing it, and now I was determined to make it myself.

  After the Pistols gig Hooky had gone into Manchester and bought himself a bass guitar and a book like mine on how to play it. I think it cost him about £35, which was quite a lot back then. The trouble with the books was that they were based on the twelve-bar progression, which forms the basis of nearly all blues and rock ’n’ roll. All the examples of songs in the book dated from the fifties, real hoary old standards in which we had no interest. I didn’t like the blues much anyhow, and I didn’t like rock ’n’ roll: what I wanted to learn about was punk and, funnily enough, there was no book out there that could teach me that.

  Despite this, I kept plugging away, learning chords late into the night until my red-raw fingertips hardened and the beginners’ pains in my hands finally began to subside. It didn’t take me long to realize that once you have the basic major and minor chords under your belt you’ve pretty much got 90 per cent of everything: the rest is all about your imagination, and you definitely can’t buy books on that. Once you’ve got those basic building blocks, you can go on to make something out of them. You don’t need to know how to play ‘Rock Around The Clock’ or ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ to make your own music; just get a few chords together, make up a few scales of your own, and away you go. If it sounds good to you, that’s all that counts.

  Music began to take up most of our spare time. Where Hooky and I had gone to my grandmother’s and messed around with hypnotism, and taken the piss out of each other and sat around talking about scooters and spark plugs, in the summer of 1976 we started trying to make music together. Our own music. It became a regular Sunday-night thing at the house in Alfred Street. My gran had a gramophone on which she’d play her old 78s, but when I looked at it I didn’t just see an old gramophone, I saw the closest thing we had to a guitar amp and set about turning it into one. I removed the stylus and soldered a couple of jack plugs into its place, Hooky plugged his bass into one, I plugged my guitar into the other and we had a sound. It wasn’t the greatest PA we’d ever play through, it certainly wasn’t the greatest sound we’d ever have, but there was a definite semblance of something coming out of the speaker. It wasn’t very loud, but it had valves and it glowed!

  We weren’t virtuosos by any stretch of the imagination, but because we were creating our own music almost as we learned how to play, it was an ideal way to develop our own methodology and sound. We had no preconceptions about chord progressions or scales, so we were able to just try things out until we’d hit on something that sounded good to us. I’d be saying, ‘Oh that sounds great with that chord, what about if you hold that note a bit longer but I change the chord?’ We were just fumbling around, like a pair of kids finding their way in the first year at primary school, not really sure what we were doing, but we’d get there in the end through trial and error. We kept this up for a good while, spending every weekend working away until we realized we’d reached the next logical step in forming a band: we started to think about finding a singer.

  Initially, we thought about whether we knew someone already who might be a candidate. The list would have been pretty short. I can’t remember exactly who was on it, but a few months ago I bumped into an old friend from those times called David Wroe, and he told me, ‘I was going to be your singer at the start but my mum wouldn’t let me.’ I’m sure a few names were bandied about, but there were no serious contenders from within our circle. Essentially, we wanted someone who was into the same scene and liked the sort of music that we liked; who seemed like a good person, wasn’t an arsehole, was someone we could get on with.

  In the end we wrote out an advert and stuck it in the window of the old Virgin Records shop on Lever Street in Manchester, the obvious place, because that’s where everyone went to buy their punk records. Virgin had also become one of the main meeting places in the city for people who were in bands, starting bands or thinking of starting bands, so was an active hub for would-be musicians. We had a phone in the flat in Greengate, so I put my number on the ad, stuck it in the window, went home and waited for it to ring.

  I had a few calls, mostly from complete basket cases. I remember going to see one guy who’d sounded vaguely promising on the phone who lived over in Didsbury. I took Terry with me, we knocked on the door and this hippie answered, hair practically down to his waist. He was wearing massive flares and had a top on that looked like it was made from a cushion cover with holes cut out for his arms and head. I took one look at him and thought he just wasn’t for us. He did little to dispel this first impression by putting a couple of cushions down and inviting us to sit on the floor. Terry and I were already giving each other sideways looks when he said he’d dig out some of his poetry and sing it to us. Poetry? This didn’t sound much like what we had in mind. Next thing we knew the guy had smoothed out these crumpled sheets of paper on the floor, reached behind the sofa, pulled out a balalaika and started strumming away, singing this soppy poetry at us. What made it even more awkward was that he was staring right into our eyes from barely three feet away, all the while singing this plaintive, winsome nonsense. I didn’t dare catch Terry’s eye, but I could hear him sniggering. I was doing everything I could not to burst out laughing, then Terry let out this little snort and that was it, we both just fell about. Eventually, we said, ‘Look, sorry mate, we just came here to tell you the job’s been filled, but thanks anyway.’ And with that we bolted for the door and legged it back to Salford, doubled up with laughter.

  That seemed to set the tone for the next couple of weeks. I’d get all these crank phone calls – ‘Are you a punk, then? Are you? You’re a punk, are you? Well fuck off then’ – and the ones that weren’t just abusive were from weirdos. It had got to the stage where I was almost dreading the sound of the phone.

  One night the phone rang at about eight o’clock. I sighed, went into my mother’s bedroom and lifted the receiver. ‘Yeah, hello,’ I said flatly. A voice at the other end said, ‘I’m phoning about the singer’s job in the Virgin window.’ I rolled my eyes and asked who he was. He said his name was Ian, and immediately I thought, Hang on, this one doesn’t sound mad. This lad sounds all right. I asked what sort of music he was into and he said he was into punk, Iggy and the Stooges, Velvet Underground, all that kind of stuff. It was then that I thought I recognized his voice. I said to him that I thought we might have met; told him that I hung out with a guy called Hooky and a guy called Terry. Did he have a donkey jacket with ‘HATE’ written on the back? ‘Yeah, I do,’ he said. ‘That’s me.’ I told him we’d met the previous week at a gig at the Electric Circus: he was one of the two Ians (he had a mate called Iain that he hung around with, and they were known imaginatively as ‘the two Ians’).

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m Ian Curtis.’

  ‘Oh right,’ I said. ‘Well, you’ve got the job.’

  I was so relieved to get a call from someone who wasn’t a weirdo or a mad hippie, let alone the fact that this was someone I’d already met. I’d bumped into him before and he wasn’t a lunatic – those were the criteria I took into consideration when I took the executive decision to say yes to Ian Curtis.

  ‘Oh, right,’ he said. ‘Well, what happens now?’

  We arranged a rehearsal in a room above a pub in Weaste called the Grey Mare, which was the headquarters of an organization called the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes. They were a kind of freemasons for the working and middle classes. At one end of the room we used there was a great big chest full of buffalo skins which they wore for their ceremonies. Despite this, it was quite a good room to rehearse in, and it was made even b
etter because it turned out Ian had his own PA system.

  At this stage we’d decided to let Terry try being a second guitarist after his failed attempt at being our drummer. I’d bought a Zenith guitar amp, but it was terrible, this horrible transistor thing that had a really thin, clean sound. I was trying to do punk music, but it made us sound more like Mark Knopfler: I kept turning it up, but no matter how hard I drove it, it just seemed to sound cleaner and cleaner and really hurt your ears. (Incomprehensibly, I’ve just bought another one on eBay. I don’t know why. Nostalgia?)

  Ian’s PA amp was also rubbish: it sounded horrible and distorted, but his speakers were OK. We got him a new amp and Terry used the old one to put his guitar through, but he played deliberately quietly so you wouldn’t hear him anyway.

  The next thing was to find a drummer to complete the jigsaw: the classic punk line-up of singer, guitar, bass and drums. This turned out to be a process that featured another litany of lunatics, nutters and arseholes, and that’s even after we’d tried Terry. Drummers, it turned out, are even worse in that respect than singers, and we ended up auditioning quite a few. Some of them were decent enough drummers but were complete pains in the arse. I remember one guy who seemed to think he was auditioning us, to see if we were good enough for him. Another guy was studying to be a PE teacher at some college somewhere, and he seemed quite promising but we didn’t feel that he really fitted in. Trouble was, we’d already told him he’d got the gig. Hooky and I drove over to Middleton to see him and, feeling a bit bad about it, on the way we stopped at a shop and bought him a box of chocolates, thinking it might soften the blow. We arrived at his college, walked in and found him fooling around with his mates, flicking wet towels at each other, real student antics.

  We called him over, sat him down and told him we had some bad news. We didn’t have the guts to tell him we didn’t want him, so we made out that the whole band wasn’t really working out and we were calling it a day. We apologized for messing him around and solemnly handed over this double-layer box of Milk Tray as a token of our appreciation. He was a little non-plussed to say the least, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. We were quite nice people and felt bad about it, especially as we’d never sacked anyone before.

  But we were still without a drummer, a situation whose urgency was expedited when our first gig landed in our laps, opening for the Buzzcocks on 29 May 1977 at the Electric Circus. We’d become friends with the Buzzcocks and would ask them for advice. We didn’t know anything about amps, guitars or any of the things you needed to know about being in a band. We used to drive around with them in Terry’s car sometimes. He had a really, really shit car, a Vauxhall Viva: the seats didn’t recline, no central locking, no cup holders … One day, the Buzzcocks were in the back, I was in the front and Terry was driving. In the door pocket he kept loads of sheets of sandpaper. It was a ‘project car’, which he was in the process of doing up, even while he was driving it, and every time he’d stop at traffic lights he’d wind his window down, get a sheet of sandpaper, lean out and start sanding down the bodywork. It was so knackered that at every other set of lights the engine would conk out, and the only way he could get it to start again was to get this rubber tube, suck petrol out of the fuel tank into his mouth, get someone to turn the ignition over, and then he’d blow petrol into the carburettor to get the engine going again. God knows how the Buzzcocks gave us the time of day with stuff like that going on. They did call Terry ‘petrol sucker’ after that, but Terry already called Pete Shelley ‘stale butter breath’. Neither of them knew, of course. They could be pretty weird, too, though, the Buzzcocks. Once, Pete Shelley pulled out his wallet, produced this horrible scaly-looking thing like an old rotten cornflake and showed it to me. I said, ‘What on earth’s that?’ He said, ‘I fell over the other day, cut my elbow and this is the scab.’ Anyway, Richard Boon, the Buzzcocks’ manager, was very supportive of us and had got us this date at the Electric Circus, which we were really excited about. Trouble was, at this stage we had neither a name nor a drummer. As well as providing us with our first gig, the Buzzcocks also tried to help us out with a name. We had a few knocking around that we were discussing: Hooky had come up with The Out of Town Torpedoes and someone else suggested The Slaves of Venus – imagine if either of those had caught on. We had to come up with a name, and quickly. Richard Boon suggested Stiff Kittens, which appealed to us at first because it sounded like a good punk name, but we discussed it and thought about how long a name like that was going to last? Also, if I’m honest, the fact we hadn’t thought of it ourselves also contributed to us deciding it wasn’t really a viable proposition. The name we did come up with that we could all agree on was Warsaw. We felt that the music we were making had a cold, austere feeling to it, and Warsaw seemed to us to be a cold, austere place (even though none of us had ever been there). So we became Warsaw, a name that was never intended to be much more than a place holder. It would do for the time being.

  At that point we weren’t looking to go out and make an immediate blazing impact on the world, we just wanted to do our first gig, acquire the experience of playing live and learn what it was like to stand up and play in front of an audience. This was to be our first foot through the door, our first low key step on the path. Anyway, it turned out there was already a band called Warsaw Pakt, so we’d have had to change our name at some point in any case, but for the time being we were Warsaw. As I recall, it was a decision made too late for the gig posters, on which we were Stiff Kittens.

  So, we’d sorted ourselves out with a name and shortly before the gig we drafted in a drummer called Tony Tabac. We were ready for our first gig. Well, readyish.

  Chapter Six

  Awaking

  The Electric Circus was in a part of Manchester called Collyhurst. I believe the building started out as a variety club and had been a cinema, but by 1977 it was a well-known punk venue. I think The Clash played there; certainly many of the punk bands coming to Manchester would have played there. It was quite a rough area, and the club was opposite the Collyhurst Flats, from where the kids would stand on the balconies lobbing bottles down at the punks queuing to get in. The punks couldn’t really complain because, well, throwing bottles off a balcony was quite a punk thing to do and, anyway, it looked quite good fun. The Electric Circus was a really good venue, though, and there were definitely worse options to host our first tentative foray into live performance.

  On the night of 29 May 1977, while the punks outside were dodging bottles falling from the sky, we were inside finishing our soundcheck, sipping our rider beer and counting down the minutes until our first ever gig. It was a set that would sound pretty unrecognizable now, it must be said. I don’t think any of the songs we played that night have survived the test of time. In our sessions at the Grey Mare we’d written and rehearsed a bunch of songs, maybe eight or nine, over a period of a couple of weeks that were all very punk, very ‘one-two-three-four!’. They were shite really, thinking back, but even then we knew it was all part of a learning process, that the songs we’d write later would be better, have more depth, be better crafted, would sound more like us rather than like every other punk band thrashing away at a hundred miles an hour. We were like apprentice bricklayers: with that first set of songs we were building a wall just to see how it was done, in the full knowledge that afterwards we were going to knock down that wall and build a house. The songs we played that night at the Electric Circus were the wall, and the house we’d build after that would become Unknown Pleasures.

  We were first on, before a band from Newcastle called Penetration. The Buzzcocks would close the night. I think John Cooper Clarke was on the bill as well. On the face of it, things didn’t look entirely promising: we were calling ourselves a different name from the one on the poster, had a drummer we barely knew and a set of songs that even we would admit were never destined to be classics. It wasn’t the most meticulously structured, smoothly prepared debut in music history.

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nbsp; You might expect, given that it was a landmark moment at the beginning of a long and remarkable story, that I’d have every moment of that first gig etched into my memory, but I’ve played literally thousands of gigs of all shapes and sizes since, so it’s very hard to put myself back in the situation of playing in front of an audience for the first time. Having said that, I do remember a little of what it felt like. When I was a kid back at the house on Alfred Street my grandfather had taught me to swim by putting a stool on the floor and having me lie on it while he showed me the different strokes. I’d be teetering on the stool, arms and legs going like the clappers, thrashing away at the air, while he instructed me on the basics. Eventually, it was time to go to the swimming baths, slip apprehensively into the water and put what I’d learned into practice. That first gig was a little like the moment I first pushed myself away from the side of the pool. Nothing to hold on to, no going back, trusting in myself and what I’d learned to keep my head above water and reach the other side. That’s the overriding feeling I’ve retained from that gig.

  As for the specifics, I remember very little, other than I broke a guitar string in the middle of a solo during a song called ‘Novelty’. To be honest, I don’t really regard that first gig as a big deal. If, during this life, I’ve climbed a mountain to get to where I am now, then that was just the first glimpse of the mountain, that’s all. I had no feeling that this was what I was born to do. It was an important experience, of course: our first lessons in stagecraft, deciding who stands where, how to set up on a stage, how to do a soundcheck, riders, dressing rooms and finding out what it feels like to be on a stage performing before a room full of people. It also answered a few questions that I’d had in my head, questions like, Do I really want to do this? What is being a musician about? What is being in a band about? What does all of it really mean? And it raised some new questions. There was a huge part of music that I didn’t like at the time – mainstream pop in the seventies, most daytime radio, shit like that – and suddenly I’d found myself possibly about to become a part of that world, part of that system. Was I going to get sucked into it and become a cog in this machine called the music business? What sort of control would I have? So that first gig wasn’t life-changing, but I had found out that yes, I could swim at the deep end. Very badly, admittedly – I was just about keeping my head above the surface and I needed a few more lessons – but I could do it. I wanted to do it and I wanted to do it my own way. I also wanted to be good at it.