Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  One aspect of the album over which Martin had no influence was the cover. The cover of Unknown Pleasures has become one of the most famous and instantly recognizable in history, up there with Dark Side of the Moon and Sergeant Pepper. The image itself is a graphic representation of a pulsar, the soundwaves of a dying star, which I’d found while leafing through an encyclopaedia of astronomy in Manchester’s Central Library. There was something about it that just grabbed me, I can’t really define what, but immediately it seemed like a perfect image for the album cover. I gave it to our designer, Peter Saville, and he took it from there. In the encyclopaedia, the image on the page was black ink on a white background, but Peter inverted the colours so it became white on black and reduced it to a much smaller size. I thought it was great. What Peter did was incredibly clever: the image is still selling on T-shirts even today, more than thirty years later.

  Peter Saville is another important part of the jigsaw. Where Martin was the in-house producer at Factory, Peter was the in-house sleeve designer, and both of them were brilliant. Martin was brilliant because he was such a wild card: if you’d put us in with a normal producer we would have frozen and the album may have sunk without trace. We didn’t want to do things in a ‘proper’ way, we wanted to fuck around and try things out in the studio, and Martin was well up for that. We were very serious about the music, really serious, but we wanted to make sure that between starting and finishing the record we had a good time too. We wanted it to be a good experience and, for most of that time, with Martin it was.

  Peter was also brought in by Tony (and was in fact one of the founders of Factory with Tony and Alan Erasmus). As had been the case with Martin, we were presented with Peter as the sleeve designer but, fortunately for us, he was and remains absolutely fantastic. One thing I like about him is that he is open to ideas but has a definite authority in what he believes to be good. Our covers, both for Joy Division and New Order, have come about in different ways: sometimes we’d take an image to Peter, other times we’d all sit down with him and look through books in the studio, or he’d bring something to show us. The Italian Futurist-style cover of Movement, for example, was entirely Peter’s creation. For Closer he turned up with a book of photographs of a graveyard in Italy by Bernard Pierre Wolff and we agreed on a picture of a family tomb. Somewhere in Genoa, I think it was. We had a picture from the same set on the cover of the ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ twelve-inch as well and, much to our intense annoyance, because they both came out soon after Ian died, we were accused of cashing in on his death. As if we would ever do anything like that: it tells you more about the people making the accusations than the band. Also, both those sleeves had been agreed and commissioned with Ian: they were going into production before he died, he’d been part of the process, had loved the images and given them the OK. For the seven-inch of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ Peter had the lettering stamped out of a piece of steel, left it underground for a couple of weeks, dug it up and photographed it. This was really clever, beautiful, groundbreaking stuff. Tony was so impressed by the cover of Closer he had it put up as a massive billboard on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Of course, no one there knew who the fuck Joy Division were, but he did it anyway.

  We got on really well with Peter, and still do. He cuts it fine at times, though. One day we were at Heathrow, just about to get on a plane, and he came rushing up puffing and panting, with a cigarette in his hand and saying, ‘This is the sleeve for Brotherhood, do you like it?’

  In the days of vinyl, when people bought twelve-inch records, the artwork was very important because it represented the band and its taste. Also, we were of the opinion that if you bought a record with a great sleeve you were getting two pieces of art for the price of one: the music and the artwork. It was important to us, the sleeve. When we were kids buying records we thought the choice of cover for a record was really interesting. We’d wonder what it was saying, how it worked in conjunction with the music and what it said about the band. Today’s digital age has reduced the impact of a record sleeve, and I think that’s a great shame, but thanks to Peter we’ve had some fantastic ones. To begin with, I’d quite fancied doing the album covers myself. I used to become involved to a limited extent, because it was something I was really interested in, but as soon as Peter came along I knew we were in safe hands.

  For all my reservations about the sound, when it came out in June 1979 Unknown Pleasures was an unmitigated success. It really put us on the map and had journalists beating a path to our door. There was one peculiar incident with a journalist who came up from London to interview us at Strawberry Studios, the first interview we ever did with the national music press, and the same guy had already given the album a five-star review, so we thought we’d be all right. Of course, we were all a bit naïve, but everything seemed positive and we were ready to meet him. Bizarrely, his attitude seemed to be, ‘Great joke, guys! Good one!’ He’d arrived with the curious assumption that we weren’t serious about what we were doing, that we’d been rumbled and he had our number: we were either a bunch of phonies or we were joking, but either way he was going to get to the bottom of it.

  The interview got off to a bad start and got progressively worse, because we were all casting sidelong glances at each other as if to say, What’s this all about? We said to him that we were perfectly serious. I think he wanted us to come clean and admit that he’d cracked the code, hold our hands up and say, It’s a fair cop, well done. Then Ian started getting aggressive and I suggested relocating to the pub to give things a chance to cool down. Maybe we could start again.

  When we got there, Hooky lost his rag at the journalist but then calmed down and offered to buy him a drink, and the guy ended up writing something like, ‘By way of an apology, the bass player offered to buy me a drink – but I said no.’ It was weird. He’d come all the way up to Stockport to interview us, but with this crazy agenda shackled to what was evidently a massive ego. Our first interview for the national music papers, and it happened to be with the worst journalist in the world. That put us off doing interviews altogether: I don’t think we did another one for a very long time. It worked in our favour, though, because we then became enigmatic, withdrawn, elitist Joy Division: it suited the image that had been imposed on us. We weren’t withdrawn or elitist at all – although Hooky would take it to the other extreme by having you believe that he and I were ‘just a pair of northern oiks’. He may feel comfortable with that description, but I don’t. OK, I may occasionally have some rather oikish habits, I enjoy the odd crude joke as much as the next man, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing else to me. I grew up in a rough place, and to some extent anyone’s habits are shaped by the culture they grew up in. I do swear far too much, even for my own liking, and I do have a bit of a tough shell at times, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get beyond it. Hooky always tried to push this sense that we were two of a kind, when, really, we couldn’t be more different.

  Joy Division was deadly serious: there was no ruse to rumble, no laughing up our sleeves at people being taken in by an elaborate spoof; we were real and we were genuine. We almost weren’t like a band; we were more like four individuals doing our own thing with almost no direct musical interplay or discussion about our music going on between us. We were like four planets in space orbiting this sun called Joy Division, and I think that’s what gave us our distinctive sound. We has no preconceptions about what we were going to make and so the sound we made was very different to what you’d hear on radio and television. It came from within us; it was absorbed from the outside but not influenced or gleaned through intense discussion. We were influenced by our individual record collections and, while we all shared a liking for certain musicians and bands, such as Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk and, from earlier days, the Stones, Neil Young and Led Zeppelin, we each had different enough musical tastes to bring a range of ideas and influences into the studio.

  The other part of my life – my family life – wa
s in a state of turmoil. Four months before we went into the studio to record Unknown Pleasures, in December 1978, Jimmy, my stepfather, who had already battled lung cancer once, found it had returned more virulently than before. Because my mother couldn’t travel, I had to go and visit him in the hospital, where most of the time he was dosed up on morphine. One day, I went in to see Jimmy and he died in front of me, just the two of us in the room. This affected me profoundly, as well as leaving both my mother and grandmother in very challenging circumstances, and I guess this episode, in an indirect way, would come to influence my contribution to Joy Division. The music we made came from life experience, informing the interplay with our instruments. What each of us played was the sound of that combination. Put all those inner conversations together, and you ended up with a Joy Division song.

  Occasionally, one of us would suggest something to someone else, but it didn’t happen very often. The last time I tried it was on ‘Transmission’, but Hooky didn’t like it. He seemed to interpret it as telling him what to do. So I gave up. It’s a shame, because you would like to feel you’re part of a team, all pushing in the same direction with a common goal, but for some reason I’ve never fathomed, it felt as if Hooky saw some kind of imagined competition going on inside the band. As the years went on, this only got worse, and I never really understood why. I felt he always tried to make out there was some kind of rivalry between us and, apparently, he still does. Even now, even though he left New Order several years ago and we’ve had almost zero contact since, he’s still trying to perpetuate this myth that we had a rivalry dating back to when we were kids. I’ve been told that he dates it as far back as my having come out of school with two O levels to his one, which if it’s true is bizarre. Any perceived rivalry between Hooky and me exists nowhere except inside his own head.

  I wish he’d come out and spoken to me about it, but the only time it broke the surface and we had a proper row was after a New Order gig at Barrowlands, in Glasgow, about how loud he was on stage. As I’ve got older, I’ve developed tinnitus, which, if aggravated, can be like having a dentist’s drill going off in your head for days on end. On stage I use a 30-watt guitar amp while he had a 1000-watt bass rig with a ‘mine’s bigger than yours’ bass cabinet, which gives you some idea of what I was putting up with. My little Vox AC30, like The Beatles used, against this monstrosity of two six-by-four-foot cabinets just a few feet away from me on stage. It was obviously just too loud and was deafening me every night. This came to a head that night at Barrowlands, and I lost my rag and we ended up having a big row over it, smashing the dressing room up, including all the mirrors – which is a whole lot of bad luck. But that’s the only time I can recall us actually having it out. The rest was suppressed for the sake of the continuation of the band, but this burning resentment he seemed to have was tiresome, palpable and pointless.

  Going back to the image that had been created of us as elitist doom-mongers, there are fewer better stories to counter this than one about touring the UK with the Buzzcocks in the autumn of 1979. By then, the Buzzcocks were quite a successful band and had generously offered us a support slot, playing to large audiences at big venues, a really kind gesture for which I’ll always be indebted to them. I’ve said before how much we owed the Buzzcocks for their support in the early days, but back then we showed our appreciation by constantly playing tricks on them. It was pretty childish really. We developed a bit of a rapport with their road crew because we travelled with them, and we were always taking the piss out of each other. In fact, the New Order song ‘Love Vigilantes’ came about as a result of travelling with the Buzzcocks crew on that tour. One of them was really into country music and he’d play it in the van the whole time. I remember thinking that this music was shit, but noticed how the songs all had a narrative, usually a sob story. This guy liked the really cheesy end of the country genre: there was one song I remember where the singer went through every state in America as a lyric – ‘Alaska if she’s seen you’, ‘What does Delaware?’: corny as hell, but so corny it was good. Years later, I remembered that and wrote a song that had a storyline, and that was ‘Love Vigilantes’.

  Anyway, at one stage during the tour, the lighting guy had played a trick on me and dosed me up with some big lump of something – he said it would help me sleep. I was still a bit naïve back then and didn’t know what it was, and it nearly blew my head clean off my shoulders. I got my own back by going to a fishing tackle shop, buying a load of maggots and pouring them into his lighting desk. That night, he was trying to do the lights for the Buzzcocks and all these maggots were crawling out of his desk. From there, things just escalated. At one venue we emptied all the leftover food from the gig on to the roof of the crew’s van. They didn’t see it when they got in, but as soon as they braked, all this half-eaten food came sliding down the windscreen.

  When it came to the last night of the tour, at the Rainbow Theatre in London, the Buzzcocks’ girlfriends had come down to join them, an opportunity we identified as too good to miss. We bought a dozen white mice and, when everyone was inside the venue, let them loose in their van. The poor girls went berserk when they saw them, screaming their heads off. We were waiting nearby in the car, nursing a couple of dozen fresh eggs, and as soon as we heard the screams we screeched round the corner, drove past and let them have it. Childish, I know, but we were children and it made us laugh.

  Chapter Ten

  Agecroft to Islington and that fateful day

  Joy Division finished the 1970s on a high. Unknown Pleasures was doing well, we’d just finished a hugely enjoyable and successful tour, the band’s profile was higher than it had ever been and it seemed to be growing by the day. We embarked upon the 1980s excited about what was to come. Elsewhere, things weren’t quite so rosy: Margaret Thatcher had become prime minister and was about to sink her teeth into the working classes, unemployment was spiralling and, as the decade began, the British steel industry was at a standstill due to strike action. We’d just had the ‘winter of discontent’, the effects of which, thanks to Terry, even managed to filter down to Joy Division.

  We were rehearsing at the time in a place opposite Lower Broughton Baths, next to North Salford Youth club. It wasn’t the most salubrious place: when it started to get dark, rats would appear at one end of the room. We shared the space with A Certain Ratio, so made sure we put their gear at the end of the room where we’d seen the rats.

  I arrived there one day to find a queue of burly-looking men standing at the foot of the staircase that led to the first-floor rehearsal room. As I was walking in, one of them stopped me and said, ‘Excuse me, mate, is this where the porn film is?’

  ‘Er, I’m sorry?’ I replied.

  ‘This is where a band called Joy Division rehearses, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, unsure where this was heading. These were not only big lads, they seemed to be looking for us.

  ‘One of our lads has a cousin called Terry,’ he said. ‘He said there was a porn film showing here tonight.’

  I went upstairs and found the windows shrouded in blackout curtains and, in the dim light of the single bulb, saw Terry setting up the chairs in rows, cinema-style. His reaction suggested he hadn’t been expecting me.

  He swallowed and explained what was going on.

  ‘It’s the picket line from Agecroft Colliery,’ he said. ‘One of them is my cousin and, to give them a bit of a boost, I thought I’d show them this porn film.’ He picked up the box. ‘It’s called Eel Fuckers of Amsterdam.’

  Fellini, eat your heart out.

  None of us knew anything about this, of course – we were supposed to be rehearsing, but Terry had arranged this cultural occasion and mixed up his dates. He couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery – officially, in fact: there was an occasion where he did try to organize a party in a Manchester brewery, and it all went dreadfully wrong.

  Eventually, all the miners traipsed in and sat down. To their muttered disquiet, Terry had a bit of
trouble getting the projector working and in the end had to call on Steve’s know-how to get it going. Then, just before the film started, we heard Ian coming up the stairs talking to someone. He was throwing out names like Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Simone de Beauvoir, and when the door opened and a man walked in ahead of him we realized he was with a French journalist who’d flown over from Paris to interview him. Ian walked in and stopped dead. Where he’d expected to find us all set up and ready to rehearse, instead he found a load of miners in donkey jackets sitting in front of a makeshift screen with the lights out.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, not much,’ I replied. ‘These lads are striking miners and Terry’s putting a porn film on to show them.’

  Ian whirled round to the journalist and said, ‘It’s not normally like this, I promise,’ just as the film flickered into life on the screen. As you can probably imagine from the title, it was utterly disgusting.

  Anyway, this atmosphere of industrial unrest and social deprivation would set the tone for the forthcoming decade, but we weren’t to know that at the time. Hence it was with feelings of excitement and optimism that we went into the studio in March 1980 to record our second album, Closer.

  Martin Hannett was in the producer’s chair again and this time we had a little bit more of a budget than we’d had for Unknown Pleasures. Because we’d moaned so much about Strawberry Sound, we were installed at Pink Floyd’s Britannia Row in Islington, north London. The difference was immediately obvious: the sound wasn’t dead, there was a tangible ambience to the rooms and it had great big speakers that sounded like club speakers. One strong memory I have of our first day there is the receptionist bringing us tea and sandwiches. I was gobsmacked. We were being treated like proper musicians rather than unwashed northern scum! Yes, things were definitely looking up.