Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  Most of the time Ian was a really polite, pleasant person, a pleasure to be around: funny, interesting and great company. He was best man at my first wedding (which was a very low-key occasion: we were too young and, unfortunately, the marriage didn’t last, although it did produce my first son, James). But it could be a delicate emotional balancing act with Ian. If he saw something as an injustice – like at the Stiff/Chiswick night, for example – or someone wound him up, he’d reach a tipping point and blow up into these huge explosions, like a Tasmanian devil. There would always be some justification for it, they weren’t irrational rages and they’d soon blow themselves out, but on the occasions he blew, he really blew. One thing he particularly hated on the road, and which always seemed to catch him out, was the kind of charges hotels levied on phone bills. He didn’t realize that if you made an external call from the phone in your room they would charge you a premium rate. Whenever we checked out, Rob would present him with massive phone bills that were bigger than his weekly wage and it would always send him over the edge and he’d go absolutely fucking barmy at Rob, as if Rob was trying to rip him off.

  Ian was a contradiction in so many ways. He was mad about being in a group, mad about music and mad about Joy Division making music, yet at the same time he was fearful of all those things – something that was very difficult for the rest of us to puzzle out. You didn’t really know where you stood with him; whether he was in the band for life (as things turned out, we’ve been around a very long time), or that he was going to decide one day he didn’t want to do it any more. He was unpredictable. He was so passionate about Joy Division and this being what he wanted. He loved writing the lyrics and he loved performing up there on stage. He truly thought we were the best band in the world, but at the same time he didn’t know if he was still going to be there tomorrow, whether in a few weeks’ time he could have walked away from it all and be running a corner shop somewhere.

  I remember talking to him around the time we were recording Closer. He told me that the lyrics were practically writing themselves, they were coming thick, fast and fully formed, but he said he felt as if he was being pulled inexorably into a great big whirlpool. I didn’t know what he meant by that. I think he may have had an epileptic fit that night; I seem to remember a cut on his head I hadn’t noticed earlier, so he may have had a small fit and bashed his head. He seemed to feel that things were moving quickly and escaping his control inside and outside Joy Division. The band was really starting to take off at that stage: maybe he felt there’d been no chance to take stock, no time to stop and fully appreciate what was happening.

  He was a real music fan, Ian: since his teens he’d loved The Doors, The Velvet Underground, Iggy, Bowie, Kraftwerk, Neu. Music represented an escape for him. He’d grown up and still lived in Macclesfield, a small town where there wasn’t much going on. Like any kid in that situation, he had a dream of getting out, of going on to greater things, the way his musical heroes had. But here was that dream actually coming true, something that perhaps he hadn’t really anticipated, and he found himself questioning everything. It was, after all, a dream that came with certain responsibilities: having to deliver to increasingly large live audiences, having to create an album of new material as good if not better than the last. Maybe he was thinking, What am I going to do if it gets even bigger? What if I can’t keep producing the goods? How am I going to cope?

  He was facing an intense dichotomy: he really, really wanted it, but here he was getting it and finding he wasn’t sure it was what he wanted after all.

  I’m sure his diagnosis only served to increase that turmoil. He must have thought that his epilepsy might take everything away from him, and felt a huge sense of responsibility to the rest of the band: with all that he was trying to cope with, he gave himself the added pressure of not wanting to let anyone down. If he packed it in, he thought, everyone else would have to pack it in too.

  He did leave the band at one point after the recording of Closer, only for a day or so, but he did quit. He went to see Rob and told him he didn’t want to do it any more and was moving away to open a bookshop in Bournemouth. He had a childhood friend who’d moved there while they were still at school and he wanted to rekindle that friendship and settle down there. Knowing Ian, I’m sure that on that particular day when he said that particular thing he believed a hundred per cent that it was what he wanted to do. Maybe it was an escape valve, maybe his wife, Debbie, had wanted him to do it, or maybe he felt he had to walk away from everything because of his illness. But later he’d feel something else, something completely different, and backtrack. I think he used to withdraw into himself, dwell upon the pressures he faced and come to a conclusion, only for the fighter inside him to emerge and persuade him not to give in to that conclusion. Then he’d end up rebelling against what he saw as his moment of weakness. The Bournemouth thing came totally out of the blue and after a day or so was never mentioned again, but it was a clear sign he was under pressure: pressure to keep coming up with new material and to keep up his intense, almost frantic performance on stage.

  He never said he felt under pressure at gigs, but since his death I’ve read one of his letters, where he did admit to feeling increasing anxiety about maintaining his live performances. On stage, Ian was pretty full on, and I think he definitely felt the burden of having to deliver that hundred per cent performance every time, especially with the amount of gigs we were playing and, of course, especially in his state of health. It’s hard enough having epilepsy, but imagine having it in the public eye like that.

  The threat of fitting hung over him like the sword of Damocles. For all the drugs he was on and the treatment he was receiving, a fit could still happen at any time, even on stage. All it would take was the wrong beat or the lights flashing in a certain way and he’d be gone, on stage, in front of hundreds of people. Sometimes we’d finish the song, Steve’s drums would stop, but Ian would still be dancing and we’d realise he was on the brink of a grand mal fit. By then, of course, we were much more aware than we’d been that cold December night on the hard shoulder of the M1, so we’d gently coax him off the stage to a back room as quickly as we could, where he’d start having the fit. We’d hold him down in an attempt to prevent him hurting himself until, eventually, the convulsions would subside. Then he’d tell us all to leave him alone and cry to himself, alone in a strange room in a strange town, just breaking his heart.

  It’s important to remember that we were all still very young when this was happening, barely into our twenties. In many ways, we were still adolescents. To be the focal point of a band that was rocketing from obscurity to stardom, a band into which you were putting your heart and soul, would be pressure enough for anyone at any age, but add being diagnosed with a serious medical condition that could manifest itself in the most public way almost without warning just when the band is really taking off (Ian’s epilepsy diagnosis was confirmed between us recording our first Peel session in January ’79 and his appearing on the front cover of the NME for the first time in August ’79), not to mention the effects of what were comparatively primitive drug treatments and the turmoil of his private life, and you can only marvel at the level of pressure he must have been feeling.

  At the time, we were young lads leading exciting lives, seemingly with the world at our feet. Everything was going to be fine. Everything was going to be great. Wasn’t it?

  Chapter Nine

  Graft

  In April 1979 we went into the recording studio for the sessions that would become Unknown Pleasures with a tangible sense of trepi dation. The debacle of our previous experience was still in our minds and still giving us the horrors. Was every producer like Mr Time-Is-Money? Is that what making an album was like?

  Thankfully, recording Unknown Pleasures would be the antithesis of what had gone before. Martin Hannett was Rob’s and Tony’s choice to produce our first album. We didn’t have that much say in the matter and didn’t know much about him, but as the extr
aordinary longevity of the album has borne out, he was obviously a good choice. Martin was a born maverick, a wonderful conduit of creativity and great fun to be around – most of the time. He’d produced the first Buzzcocks EP, worked with John Cooper Clarke and, when we began work on the album, he was about to have a hit single with Jilted John, so his production net was already cast pretty wide. But it was with Joy Division that he’d become most closely associated, and he did as much as anyone to help foster our unique sound.

  Ian was happy with Martin as our producer and, if Ian was happy, we were happy. Ian had a great sixth sense for what was good for us and had an intuition that Martin was the right guy. I certainly noticed an immediate bond between them. For a start, Martin may have been a maverick but there was no chance of him ever asking Ian to sound like James Brown.

  The immediate and lasting impact Martin had on me was that he made me completely re-evaluate the role of the recording studio. Until I worked with him I’d always thought a recording studio was nothing more than a giant tape recorder, but he made me see that the studio could be an instrument in itself. Martin’s attitude was that the studio was a wonderfully creative space put at our disposal, so let’s do something really cool with it.

  We made the album at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, which was owned by 10CC. I’d never seen a studio like it in my life: it was packed with all sorts of gear, way over spec for a band like us. There we were, a bunch of 21-year-old punks, looking around at racks and racks of state-of-the-art gear and wondering what all the flashing lights were for. I loved it. I’d look around in awe, thinking that you could make a record just with all this, never mind the guitars.

  Mad as it might sound now, it took us just three weekends to record Unknown Pleasures: one weekend to record the basic tracks, another to record overdubs and the third to mix it. There was no synth player making cat noises, but some of the overdubs were quite wacky, such as Martin recording smashing glass and the sound of the building’s lift shaft. Another thing we did for the first time with Martin on Unknown Pleasures, something that would prove to have quite a legacy in the coming years, was make our very first use of a sampler. Martin had this little unit with a keyboard made by AMS and told me to plug my guitar into it and play a few notes. After that, he told me to press the keys on the keyboard and, when I did, the sound of my guitar came out of the speakers. So there we were, using samplers on our records as far back as 1978.

  Typically, the first session started on the wrong foot, thanks to another issue with my guitar amp. In those days, my drink of choice was brown ale, not because I particularly liked it but because at gigs people would come into the dressing room afterwards and nick all the rider. No one, however, would nick my sweet, nutty brown ale. Anyway, no sooner had we started the first recording session than I’d knocked a full bottle of it into my amp. I braced myself for a bollocking, but Martin’s reaction couldn’t have been more different to the last guy’s.

  ‘Don’t worry, Bernard,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a friend called Martin Usher who’s a scientist. I’ll get him to pop round and fix it.’ Within the hour, this eccentric, lovable character arrived, a kind of slimmer, younger and bearded version of Patrick Moore with a bit of Brian Cox thrown in. He fixed the amp in no time and we were able to get the session up and running without too much of a hold-up. This was the start of a long friendship.

  Once we were under way, the recording process was notably quick, and this time it wasn’t because the guy in charge effectively had a meter running. The songs were all written, and had been rehearsed and honed by playing live. We knew which tempos worked and that we’d got the arrangements right. After we’d recorded our parts we stuck around for a few overdubs and then disappeared while Martin mixed it. He preferred mixing alone in the studio, essentially because he thought musicians were complete twats who had no right to be in a recording studio once they’d laid down the basic tracks.

  But then again, what is the role of a record producer? Some producers don’t overly impose themselves on the songs but make sure the finished recording sounds good and is mixed well. In retrospect, I don’t think this was Martin’s priority: I think he saw his role in a more creative light and desired a greater input, wanting to twist the sound of the album from its original inception closer to his own vision. Which was OK as long as it sounded good too.

  We didn’t hear the final record until Martin had completely finished mixing it and, to be honest, when we heard it, it split the band into two camps, one loving it, the other hating it. Strawberry Studios had been built and fitted out absolutely by the book, seventies style: carpets on the walls and a really dead sound in the studio. The prevailing philosophy at the time was that you’d record everything completely dry and flat frequency-wise then add all the atmosphere electronically afterwards. It was a concept that had been taken to its limits in that studio: it was completely dead, there wasn’t a hint of natural ambience. If you listen to the drums on a lot of disco records from that period, it’s a completely dry, flat sound: there’s no room ambience at all. That might be fine for disco, but it doesn’t work for rock music: it makes it sound like the track has been played in a vacuum.

  Paring the sound back to its bare bones in this way gave Martin a blank canvas from which to work on our album, allowing him the freedom to create his own electronic ambience. He had a device called a Marshall Time Modulator as well as an AMS delay unit that added that ambience artificially. I think it’s a great idea in theory, and it could certainly work today, because the technology has advanced to a point where you can re-create natural ambience very accurately, but in those days the technology and computer power were so weedy I thought it sounded tinny. I didn’t get it. I couldn’t understand why you couldn’t just record somewhere with its own natural feel, but Martin had seen it as an opportunity to create and record an entirely new sound. I guess he was just too far ahead of the technology.

  He was vindicated up to a point, because the album was – and continues to be – very successful. Whether that’s down to the production, the songs, the arrangements, people’s perception of the band or a combination of everything, I don’t know, I’m too close to it to say for certain. But the instant I heard Unknown Pleasures I knew I didn’t like it. I felt Martin had robbed us of our power; it was as if Samson’s hair had been cut.

  At the same time, I found this attitude of Martin’s to the studio, to use it as a great big instrument in its own right, incredibly interesting, and I admired his instinct for innovation. Samplers, for example, supposedly hadn’t even been invented yet!

  Ian thought the album was wonderful. I distinctly remember him declaring it a classic record straightaway. Steve was broadly noncommittal but inclined towards liking it. Hooky and I didn’t because we felt it had become a Martin Hannett record first and a Joy Division record second. To us, Martin had taken away the rocky aggression of our sound. You can make a comparison between what we sounded like live and what we sounded like after being fed through Martin’s production process if you check out the recorded version of ‘Transmission’ then dig out a recording of us playing the same track live at the Les Bains Douches in Paris a few months later. It was a nice gig – there was a small swimming pool in one corner – which was recorded for French radio and mixed really well for broadcast. It’s a much more aggressive sound than on Unknown Pleasures and provides a good illustration of what at least two of us felt had been changed radically by Martin’s production.

  Even though the end product wasn’t powerful enough for me – the drums were too thin and weedy, and there’s no way Steve’s drumming is thin and weedy – just having Martin in the studio made good things happen. You played well instinctively; you had a feeling you were making something very special and forward-looking. He also made us feel very comfortable, which in the light of our past experiences was critical. He was never afraid to experiment: he’d encourage you to pick up instruments that might be lying around in the studio which you’d never have drea
med of using. On one hand we were left with an album that didn’t sound like us, but on the other we loved some of the strange, curious and wonderful things he’d do in the studio.

  Even if we’d been united in our dislike of the way the album had turned out, there was nothing we could have done about it, as there was no money left to re-record anything. When I played Unknown Pleasures for the first time, I was nonplussed by the sound and was afraid the public might not ‘get’ the songs because of it. Hearing it posed a question that I couldn’t answer: was this album any good or not? I’d never made a proper album before, so I was very relieved when it came out to instant acclaim. I remember going into work, buying all the music papers on the way, leafing anxiously through them to the reviews section and finding them all to be glowing. More than glowing, in fact: they were gushing. For me, finally, that was the moment everything changed; that was the moment of catharsis. Thank you, all those journalists who gave the album a good review.