Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  Back in the late seventies, Manchester was not the place it is now. I know I’m probably supposed to subscribe to the received wisdom that Manchester back then was a gritty northern city with bags of character and that I’d give anything to go back, but I wouldn’t. I absolutely wouldn’t. I much prefer Manchester the way it is now. I know it sounds like a contradiction to what I’ve just said about architecture, but I think the new buildings provide a good visual foil for the remaining Victoriana, most of which is good quality. I guess the key word here is ‘good’. There are parts of it I miss: it had a great community spirit, and I’ve already talked at length about how much I loved that aspect of growing up in Salford. The city is a bit homogenized now – for the most part, the shops are the same as they are everywhere else – but I think it’s definitely a more pleasant place to be today than it was back then. It’s less threatening at night, for example – to get a late Saturday-night bus back to parts of Salford back then could be a refreshing experience, to say the least. You could get stabbed quite easily, and I certainly don’t miss that.

  As I see it, the things of value in the city have been made better, while great strides have been made in eliminating the bad things. They’ve put the tram link back in, having removed it in the late sixties, and it’s returned an artery to the centre of the city; it’s added to the life of it. The decay’s all but gone. Not all of it has been replaced with something beautiful, admittedly, but modern Manchester has a renewed vibrancy which I much prefer to how it was in the old days. I think Manchester got a bit lost in the late seventies; there was a stoop-shouldered sense of ‘we used to be a big manufacturing hub but we don’t make anything any more; there are no jobs in the factories; thank you, Margaret Thatcher’. The place was down on its luck and to a certain extent was wallowing in it, but it’s managed to revitalize itself and become a better place.

  I miss a few old nooks and crannies in the city, odd places where sometimes you could find yourself in some sort of crumbling Dickensian village that seemed self-contained and cut off from the rest of the world, or you’d find quirky shops or old places selling bits for valve radios, curiosities and anachronisms, places that had been there for seventy years, completely out of date, with mad old men selling knick-knacks from another age. Now that it’s all Starbucks and Costa, I do miss that aspect of the old Manchester, coming across the skeleton of an old barge or a disused lock-keeper’s cottage slowly decaying into dust. Now, there’ll be a gastropub there.

  Rob and Tony bonded over their vision for Manchester and its culture, but they also knew what was best for us and acted on it. Hence, one of the first things Rob did was to secure us a spot on Tony’s show, Granada Reports, which had succeeded his popular So It Goes. We made our television debut on 20 September 1978, playing a new song we’d been working on, ‘Shadowplay’. It was a little bit terrifying, being up there on live television in the artificial setting of a TV studio, but we played all right. The director overlaid us with these gritty shots of cars on a freeway reversed out so it looked like a negative, which added to the starkness of the song and our performance. It looked really good.

  Clearly, having Rob and Tony on board was going to make a difference.

  Tony’s first line when entering a room was always, ‘I can’t stay, darlings, I’ve just come to say you’re doing a great job, I’ve heard the new stuff, it’s fabulous, got to dash, goodbye!’ He could never stay in one place for very long. It was as if he’d briefly sample what was going on then go away and ponder in private rather than any more direct interaction. He always meant well, he wanted to help the city and the music scene in city. His attitude was to question why everything had to be in London, which we thought was great. Both questioning it and London, to be honest.

  As I think the Granada Reports performance shows, we were starting to find our feet by this stage. We were getting plenty of gigs, our live set was really tight and we were always coming up with new material. Not only was the number of gigs increasing, we were going down really well at them too. In the early days, when we were criss-crossing the Pennines, sometimes we’d even have to pay to play; we’d do anything just to get that vital experience behind us. Now, playing new venues and meeting people who hadn’t heard us before, we were finding we always got a strong reaction from the crowd.

  We knew we were on to something. We were building a following through our live performances of a tight set of songs. We were good, and we knew it. It was time to go into the studio and demonstrate how good we were.

  Chapter Eight

  Cold winds blowing

  Our first proper experience in a studio had been the An Ideal for Living session, the one that ended up sounding terrible because of the slapdash way it was recorded and produced and the disastrous way we’d had it pressed. After that, we felt nothing could be that bad again, so when we next entered a recording studio, in May 1978, we felt a mixture of apprehension and cautious optimism. We were going in to record our first album but, as it turned out, it would be one that would never see the light of day, at least officially.

  Ian had got to know a guy called Richard Searling, who was something high up at RCA Records’ office in Manchester, and Richard had told Ian about a guy he knew who was interested in signing us to a soul label from America. He’d heard that punk was the new big thing and he wanted to sign a punk band. Richard put us in touch and booked some studio time for us to go in and record.

  It turned out that the guy was a complete nightmare. Here was someone not remotely interested in anything we wanted to do, just a time-is-money merchant, a clock-watcher and watch-tapper who was only concerned about how large he could make the figure at the bottom of the balance sheet.

  The studio we used was owned by Greendow Commercials, where I worked. They had a graphics and film department where they did a lot of editing and rostrum camera work for Granada, and there was also a sound effects studio which I’d worked in occasionally. At the back of the building they’d installed a recording studio intended mainly for recording commercials and voiceovers, but it was a full studio nonetheless. I managed to negotiate us a cheap rate and we all turned up there one morning excited about recording our first album. When we arrived, there was a guy already in the studio finishing off a voiceover for Littlewoods Lotteries. I can still remember how it went: ‘Littlewoods Lotteries, more and more win Littlewoods!’, because he needed several goes at it before he got it right, and we had to wait for him to finish. This didn’t bode well for making a classic album, but this was about as good as the session would get.

  The guy from the record label arrived and announced he wanted us to record the album in one day and he’d mix it the next. As soon as we set up the gear my guitar amp started buzzing and the guy went mad at me, shouting, ‘Get your fucking amp sorted, I’m losing money here.’ This was before we’d even played a note. We recorded the backing tracks and had moved on to recording Ian when things got worse. He gave poor Ian a hell of a time, demanding that he ‘sing like James Brown’, among other things. Ian Curtis was a lot of things, but the Godfather of Soul he wasn’t. When we’d finished recording everything and were ready to leave for the day, out of the blue the guy said that he was bringing someone in to do overdubs the following morning and we had a choice between a synth player or a sax player. We said we didn’t want either, thanks, but were informed we had no choice in the matter beyond picking which one. We left feeling very dejected and walked through the centre of Manchester in stunned silence. We’d been looking forward to recording an album, but this guy was a tosser who’d turned the whole process into a nightmare from the minute we’d walked into the studio. We turned over what had happened in our minds as we walked away from the studio. No one said anything until Ian broke the silence. ‘I’m not coming back tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘But we’re halfway through, Ian,’ I replied. ‘We might as well just finish it now and see what happens.’ He thought about it for a while then reluctantly agreed, and we parted, making o
ur separate ways home with stooped shoulders and an air of bitter disappointment.

  The next day the bad vibes picked up where they’d left off. We hated the guy, and he clearly didn’t give a toss about us. He probably couldn’t have told you our names even after two days in the studio. We were just a commodity to be exploited and shipped out as fast as possible before he moved on to the next one.

  When he’d put the overdub gun to our heads the previous day we’d chosen the synthesizer – can you imagine a Joy Division record with a sax solo? – and, sure enough, this session guy arrived and started setting up his gear. We all looked at each other, clearly thinking the same thing: a fucking session musician? Not very punk, is it? He started running through a few sounds on his synth and asked us what kind of stuff we liked. Kraftwerk and Donna Summer, we said, and his eyes lit up. He changed a couple of settings, pressed the keys and the synth started making these high-pitched mewmewmew sounds. He looked at us expectantly. I don’t know whether it was meant to remind us of Kraftwerk or Donna Summer, but it sounded like nothing we’d ever heard before. I said, ‘You can get rid of that for a start, it sounds like a fucking cat.’ He straightened up, looked at us, and declared, ‘That’s what synths are all about, man.’

  The session guy and the dickhead from the record company spent the day blasting through the album doing shit mixes of the songs we’d worked so hard to create. We got out of there as soon as we could, and dreaded hearing what it would sound like. It was clear we’d fucked up. A couple of weeks or so later, we’d taken on Rob as our manager and we told him what had happened. He pursed his lips for a moment, stood up and said, ‘Right, we’ve got to get those tapes back.’ I think we ended up having to pay something like five grand for them, and of course the guy had made copies anyway, which weren’t long in coming out as a bootleg. Rob had to engage a lawyer to untangle the mess we’d got ourselves into but, thankfully, nothing like that would ever happen again.

  There was one positive thing to come out of that session: the clock-watcher had a Northern Soul record he really liked called ‘Keep On Keeping On’ and wanted us to cover it. We told him we didn’t do cover versions, but we listened to it and really liked the guitar riff. We basically lifted the riff and built our own track around it. It was ‘Interzone’: Hooky wrote the lyrics and sang it, and it was actually pretty good. But apart from that, the whole experience had been a disaster, and an expensive one at that.

  Once we’d put that incident behind us, we were ready to move on. One of the first things we did with Rob as our manager was commit properly to Factory Records. We contributed a couple of tracks to the first record ever released on Factory, A Factory Sample, which came out at Christmas 1978 and also featured Cabaret Voltaire, John Dowie and The Durutti Column. If I remember rightly, we’d recorded the tracks we used, ‘Digital’ and ‘Glass’, with Martin Rushent (who went on to produce The Human League’s massive Dare album, among others), as he was looking for a band to sign to his label, a subsidiary of United Artists. We’d recorded these demos in his studio down in London and got on all right with him; he was a bit of a laugh, but he was very businesslike and not as relaxed as we’d have liked and nothing came of it in the end. So when Tony asked us to contribute a couple of tracks to A Factory Sample, we dug out ‘Digital’ and ‘Glass’ and handed them over for Martin Hannett to remix. We had them in the can already, so it wouldn’t cost anything, and they’d never been released anywhere else. That was our first appearance on Factory.

  It was a while before we’d go into the studio as a Factory band, but we kept gigging, including a tour supporting The Rezillos, and our last gig of 1978 was a special one: our first appearance in London. It would be at the Hope and Anchor in Islington, on 27 December, which would turn out to be a very strange day indeed. The Hope and Anchor was a famous pub on the circuit, a gig you had to do and a good venue to get some exposure in London. After months of trying, Rob had finally secured us a spot there and we were excited about what was potentially a big opportunity for us.

  The problems started when I went down with a bad dose of the flu on the morning of the gig. When Steve picked me up in his car I felt like shit; I was completely spaced out and couldn’t stop shivering. I grabbed a sleeping bag from home, got in the car, bedded down as best I could and we set off for London. On the way down, despite feeling like death warmed up, I noticed that Ian seemed to be in an odd mood. He was being unusually antagonistic, moaning about everything and declaring anything anyone said to be ‘fucking stupid, that’. After a long drive south we arrived at the gig, set up, soundchecked and did the gig to – I’m not joking – the one man and his dog who turned up. That was the entire audience, and I don’t think the dog liked us. The gig was in that strange period between Christmas and New Year when most people don’t really go out, especially to a freezing-cold pub basement to see a band from the other end of the country who they’d never heard of. It was a disaster.

  It would have been bad enough had I been feeling a million dollars, but I was really struggling. Every time Steve hit a cymbal the room seemed to swim and turn upside down. That a gig we’d been looking forward to had turned into such an anticlimax meant that no one was in the best of moods, so we got through it as best we could, packed the gear away and went to a little Greek restaurant after-wards, feeling pretty sorry for ourselves. Ian was still in this strange negative mood that seemed to me to be about more than just a shit gig. ‘Fucking hell,’ he kept saying. ‘All this bloody way for nothing – have I really had to take time off work for this?’ We paid the bill, piled back into the car and headed north. It had been a crap day, a crap gig – even the food in the restaurant had been crap – and we just wanted to get home as quickly as possible. We pulled on to the M1 and I wrapped my sleeping bag around me ready to sweat out the long journey home.

  A short while later – we hadn’t even got as far as Luton – Ian turned round to me from the front seat and said, ‘Give me that sleeping bag.’ I tried to ignore him – I was still feeling terrible and just wanted to get home to my own bed – when suddenly he leaned over, grabbed it and wrenched it off me. I grabbed it back, then he grabbed it again. I snatched at it, but this time he wouldn’t let go and I ended up losing my grip. When I looked up I saw he’d covered his head with it and had started making this weird growling noise. I said, ‘Ian, what are you fucking doing? What’s this about?’ The next thing we knew he’d pulled the sleeping bag off himself and started punching everything in reach, taking swings at the windscreen, the side windows, even poor Steve, who was driving. Steve pulled over on to the hard shoulder, we dragged Ian out of the car and laid him on the ground. He was shaking uncontrollably and having what we’d later learn was a full-on epileptic fit. We held him down until it subsided, and he just lay there on the tarmac, completely dazed. It was a terrifying thing to see, not least because at that stage we had no idea that Ian had epilepsy. We carried him back to the car, pulled off the M1 at the first available exit and took him straight to A&E at the nearest hospital, which was in Luton. It was a horrible night. As we waited for news of Ian, people were having their stomachs pumped and all sorts. Eventually the doctor came out to see us. The indications were that Ian had had an epileptic fit, he said, and he asked us if Ian had epilepsy. We said no, no he hasn’t, because we just had no idea. It was a strange, surreal and ultimately very sad night. As we hung around the casualty department, with its aroma cocktail of floor bleach, antiseptic and vomit, we had no inkling of the impact it would have on our futures. The possible implications were lost on us in the immediate aftermath of Ian’s fit: we were just baffled. One bizarre memory I have of sitting in that hospital waiting for news is how pissed off Steve was because Ian had his cigarettes. He went into the cubicle and got them out of his coat pocket. ‘Never mind him,’ he was saying. ‘What about my cigs?’ We all cracked up at this. It was a bit of light relief after a disastrous day.

  Once the doctors had released Ian, we drove back the rest of the wa
y in almost total silence. Ian spent the journey with his head against the window, looking out sightlessly at the darkness and the occasional pinprick lights of nameless passing towns.

  When he saw the doctors back at home they confirmed the worst, diagnosing Ian with grand mal epilepsy. He was prescribed some very strong drugs. They didn’t know nearly as much about epilepsy in the seventies as they do today, and the treatment was pretty brutal. The drugs available to the doctors then were heavyduty pharmaceutical sledgehammers and I noticed within the space of a couple of weeks how they’d changed Ian’s personality. One minute he’d be laughing and joking, the next he’d have his head in his hands, on the verge of tears: you didn’t know where you were with him emotionally and neither did he.

  I think people have a perception of Ian as being this gloomy, tortured poet. When you see the iconic photos of him, like those taken at TJ Davidson’s and those famous shots by Kevin Cummins of us in the snow in Manchester, he looks really down. A lot of people think that’s what he was like all the time; that his default setting was this eloquent, dark, haunted soul, but that image doesn’t sum up Ian’s personality at all. He could be a great laugh, really good company. He was pretty good to take the piss out of, too, and was often the fall guy for practical jokes. For example, he wore these winklepicker shoes and skinny jeans and often we’d be in Steve’s blue Cortina and Ian would get us to stop because he needed a piss. We’d pull over, he’d get out, stand close to Steve’s car and start pissing, and I’d say, ‘Steve, look, he’s pissing down the side of your car, just pull off, quick,’ and Steve would drive off, straight over his winklepickers. ‘What are you fucking doing?’ he’d shout. ‘Ahh, not again! Every fucking time! Where the fuck do you expect me to stand – we’re on a main road. I don’t want people seeing me with my knob out!’