Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  I’d been growing more and more interested in synthesizers since Unknown Pleasures and had acquired an ARP Omni as well as a little Transcendent 2000 that I’d built myself. On this album we intended to experiment with more electronic sounds and, to that end, Martin brought with him a big ARP 2600 modular synth, which was a beast. We used them on a few tracks, notably for some of the sounds on ‘The Eternal’ and ‘Decades’, while Martin made some electronic drum sounds with the 2600 that sounded amazing.

  The bigger budget also meant that we had a bit more time than the six days we’d had to make Unknown Pleasures, which left us with more licence to experiment. We’d usually start at around four o’clock in the afternoon and keep working until dawn. It was a methodology that really suited me: working at night felt more atmospheric and there were fewer distractions; we didn’t get bothered as much and could be left to our own devices. Having said that, U2 came over from Ireland to see us at one point. They were just starting out then and I think they were fans of the first album. As a result, they wanted Martin to produce their album, so they sat in on the recordings for a little while.

  To me, the whole thing seemed like a great big adventure: this intriguing electronic world to experiment with and the opportunity to create new sounds we’d never thought about before. I really enjoyed working with Martin on Closer. He was aware of our reservations about Unknown Pleasures (and, of course, blamed the engineer and the studio rather than shouldering the criticism himself), so this time we went for a bigger drum sound and used more keyboards.

  Ian didn’t enjoy Closer as much as he’d enjoyed Unknown Pleasures. For one thing, he thought that the keyboards ‘made it sound like fucking Genesis’, but he was also having a bit of a difficult time in his personal life and was quite often in an antagonistic frame of mind. He’d met and started a relationship with Annik Honoré, a music journalist from Brussels who worked for the Belgian Embassy in London, and he was in a vulnerable frame of mind while we were down in the capital. It was another Ian contradiction: he felt guilty about the affair because he was married to Debbie and they had a baby girl, Natalie, only a few months old, but at the same time he still wanted to be with Annik. It wasn’t like Ian to have an affair, and with this, along with his epilepsy, he was walking a dangerous path.

  We were all staying together in a flat not far from the studio in which the bedrooms were at opposite ends. Steve, Hooky and Rob were in one part, while Martin, Ian and I shared the other side. Annik came and stayed for a while, but from the moment she arrived there seemed to be a bit of an ‘Oh look, it’s John and fucking Yoko’ vibe from Rob and Hooky. They started playing all sorts of jokes on them, taking the piss and giving them grief. I felt that it was none of our business really; Ian’s private life was nothing to do with the band. But Rob and Hooky wouldn’t let up, and sometimes it would go a little bit too far. Inevitably, it led to a falling-out when Ian got sick of it. A bit of needle had crept in: where it had started off as being funny, the ribbing had begun to develop a bit of an edge. It went beyond the verbal: Rob and Hooky started messing about with their bed, putting cornflakes in it so when they got back late from the studio, knackered, the bedclothes would be full of them; or they’d have dismantled the bed and folded it up – all this coming at the end of a long night when we’d all been working hard in the studio and Ian could have done without shit like that.

  Not surprisingly, given the constant needling from Rob and Hooky, Ian started drifting away from the band a little and began spending time with Genesis P. Orridge from Throbbing Gristle. There was also this weird Dutchman who was hanging around, and Ian started knocking about with him too. The poor guy was being pulled from pillar to post by all the piss-taking, Annik, his guilt about Debbie and Natalie and his illness. It’s no surprise he didn’t have a great time recording the album.

  On occasion, Rob could be quite odd back then. We’d get back to the flat about nine in the morning most days, wiped out, and one day as I was getting into bed he came in and said, ‘All right, Bernard? I’m just going to sit here and read the NME. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘It’s nine o’clock, Rob,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you get some shut-eye?’

  He looked at me.

  ‘I’m going to read the fucking NME,’ he replied, paused for a moment and added, ‘And I’m going to read it out to you.’

  He might have been stoned, I don’t know, but sure enough he sat there and read the NME from front to back, every single word, including the adverts, out loud at the top of his voice.

  To make things worse, Martin was there too: in our bedroom, Ian slept in the bed and Martin or I would sleep on the table or the settee. But, to my dismay, Martin didn’t find Rob irritating, he seemed to find him really interesting, and I was left trying desperately to sleep between these two fucking lunatics. Martin was saying stuff like, ‘Read that bit again Rob, that was fascinating,’ and Rob would go back and read exactly the same thing out again. We were invariably late getting to the studio every day, which was always Rob’s fault. You’d try to wake him and, even though he’d asked you to make sure he was up in time, he’d do the same thing to you every time: his two front teeth were false ones which he’d keep in a glass of water overnight by the side of the bed, and when you’d try to wake him up he’d reach for the glass, take the teeth out and fling the water over you. Every fucking day.

  Despite these kinds of shenanigans, I really enjoyed making Closer. It was nice being in London – that was a new experience for us – and it was great having our own flat and going out to clubs, bars and restaurants. You’d notice little regional differences, even in the fish and chip shops. There was one just down the road from Britannia Row, and it had this thing called rock salmon: we had no idea what it was. They didn’t have steak and kidney puddings either. There were all these little things to remind you that you weren’t at home but among southerners.

  The songs on Closer weren’t quite as set in stone as they had been on Unknown Pleasures. Where, previously, the songs had been honed, buffed and polished with relentless live performance, this time we just had the basic formats of some of them on a cassette, while others we had played live. We’d take Martin these demos and start recording the songs properly in the studio. For the most part, we were working in a different way to Unknown Pleasures: at Strawberry, we’d gone in, played it live a few times and picked the best take, which was the old-school way of doing it. This time, on some of the tracks, we’d record an electronic drumbeat, say, then play our parts over that in a series of overdubs. It was an interesting experience, because we’d never done it before. It made the whole album sound fatter. All of us being there together helped as well, I think, as, apart from the needling of Ian, and Rob doing the odd mad thing, we were there as a team. Where, before, we’d popped into the studio at the weekend, this time we were all living the whole experience together and it gave it a sense of unity.

  It was a great studio, too, Britannia Row. Pink Floyd certainly knew what they were doing when it came to sound. There was a range of different rooms we could experiment with; we could send sound through piped speakers and PA systems all over the building. There was one particular great big room, a snooker room, in which we put a massive PA set up with loads of microphones, and it sounded amazing. There was no real need to use artificial ambience, even if we’d wanted to: so many of the rooms sounded fantastic naturally.

  Being there at night could give you an odd feeling, though: we picked up some ghostly whistles one night and recorded them. You could definitely feel a strange atmosphere sometimes. It didn’t stop us messing around, though: occasionally, when we got bored, Ian and I would go into the front office and rifle through the receptionist’s Rolodex. It was full of all these names and phone numbers of people who had some connection to the studio, so we’d pick a few out and ring them up at four in the morning, just to wake them up. One of them was John Peel. Like the Buzzcocks, he was someone who’d helped us on the way who ended up on the
receiving end of a bit of nonsense. But that’s what we were like: I guess the music was so heavy we needed to relieve the tension and, whenever we got bored, we’d just start fucking around like idiots.

  Thinking back to those nights, sniggering our way through the Rolodex looking for likely victims, one hand over the mouthpiece as we’d put our ears to the receiver to hear the sleepy croak of the latest victim before collapsing in giggles, it still astonishes me to think that Ian had less than two months to live. I had no inkling that he was feeling in any way suicidal. None of us did. You look back for signs, for indicators, for missed cries for help, and maybe sometimes hindsight leads you to attach weight to incidents and words that wasn’t there at the time. But while he’d become somewhat withdrawn during the recording of Closer, and the long studio hours and nocturnal working methods perhaps exacerbated his epilepsy a little – before returning home in early April, we played four gigs in London in the space of three days and he went into a fit on stage at one of the shows at the Rainbow – I can’t recall anything that gave a hint of what was only a few weeks away. He was clearly conflicted about many things – his marriage, Annik, his medical condition, the pressures of being the front man of a successful band – but nothing at the time suggested he’d take such a drastic step.

  Yet, within just days of those late-night phone pranks at Britannia Row, we got the news that he’d tried to commit suicide. We knew he was down about his health and that his relationships were cleaving him in two: it was neither woman’s fault but, between Debbie and Annik, love really was tearing him apart. He had a child with Debbie, and I think he felt immensely guilty about even considering walking away from that situation. I’m sure he wanted someone, anyone, to tell him what he should do. If he’d turned to me and asked outright what I thought, stay with Debbie or go with Annik, I know that if I’d have expressed an opinion either way he’d have probably gone with that. It was as if he didn’t want the responsibility of having to make the decision himself. He was in a very suggestive state of mind and seemed desperate for someone to bail him out, to make the decision for him. There was no way I could or would do that; it was none of my business. It was a decision only he could make, but he showed no willingness to make it, and I found that very strange. It wasn’t just me: none of us wanted to tell him what we thought he should do, as the group was our boundary line; anything outside it was off limits. So he just went on prevaricating, turning things over and over in his mind, and it seems the method he settled upon to extricate himself from this limbo was trying to kill himself. That’s never the right solution. It’s always better to resolve the situation, no matter how painful.

  Strange as it may sound, it wasn’t until after his death that we really listened to Ian’s lyrics and clearly heard the inner turmoil in them, even before any of this started, way back to his lyric writing in the early days. I can only imagine what was going on in his head. He never talked to us or indicated anything about any deep-seated problems he may have had but, sadly, it was there in his words, right from the start.

  One day in early April, only a few days after getting back from London, we all got a call from Rob to say that Ian had taken an overdose. He wasn’t dead, he’d called the ambulance himself, but he was in hospital.

  He stayed in overnight but came out before he was ready in order to do a scheduled gig we had in Bury. He clearly wasn’t up to it, and we should have cancelled. God knows why we didn’t. I think Rob probably decided that cancelling would have just made Ian even more upset – he’d have felt he’d let everyone down, the band and the audience. We had a standby singer in Alan Hempsall from Crispy Ambulance, the idea being that with Ian so frail we’d have Alan in the wings in case he couldn’t get through the whole set. And of course Ian couldn’t get through it. He tried, but in the end he just walked off the stage. Poor Ian, his head must have been all over the place. When Alan took his place the bottles started flying and there was a full-scale riot.

  I wasn’t that bothered by the violence: you got used to extreme events at punk gigs. But in the dressing room, Ian was in bits, in floods of tears, head in his hands, repeating, ‘It’s all my fault, all this is my fault.’ Roadies were coming in bleeding from head wounds where bottles had hit them; it was an awful situation. Rather than making Ian feel less guilty, which had been Rob’s intention in going ahead with the gig, it had made him feel worse.

  Because of the situation with Debbie, who’d found out about Annik, Ian was staying with Tony and his wife, Lindsay, at this point but after a while I invited him to come and stay with me. I tried to talk to him about what was going on. I even tried hypnosis (I’d been reading about past-life regression therapy and tried it on Ian; see Appendix 1). We’d be up late into the night, as I’d taken to staying up until four or five in the morning since we recorded Closer. I’d either listen to music or watch films – a lot of Stanley Kubrick, I remember – or, when it got really late and everything had shut down, I’d sit there bored out of my skull, listening to Truckers’ Hour on the radio, and build synthesizers.

  When Ian came to stay I’d talk to him about all sorts of things, what books he liked, for example, just trying to help as best I could, keep him stimulated. At one point I asked him straight if he’d really intended to commit suicide or was it a classic cry for help. He was unequivocal. ‘I definitely intended to kill myself,’ he said. ‘The only reason I bottled out was that I didn’t think I had enough tablets and I’d heard that if you don’t take enough to kill you, you can end up with brain damage.’

  But you never knew if Ian really meant what he was saying. I tried to be straight with him, to pull him up. We were walking back from rehearsals one night, back to where I was living at the time, in a place called Peel Green, and I purposely took us through the big cemetery there, pointing at the gravestones saying, ‘It’s fucking stupid, Ian. Imagine what it would be like to see your name on one of them. I can’t tell you which way to go in your life, but killing yourself definitely isn’t the answer.’ I was trying to make him see what a waste of a life it would have been if he’d succeeded, but I didn’t get much of a response.

  As human beings, we all mature physically from childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, but our emotions lag behind. In our twenties, I think most of us still have the emotional capacity of an adolescent: our emotional maturity hasn’t kept pace with our physical maturity. Your twenties are a particularly difficult period: you’re not tough emotionally, you’re still quite soft and malleable, and it’s a period when you go through a sequence of emotional storms in your relationships. But you aren’t yet equipped to deal with some of the shit that life throws at you. I think if you can make it through your twenties you can pretty much deal with anything. Sadly, Ian turned out to be one of those people who couldn’t.

  It wasn’t just me; we all tried to steer him away from even considering suicide. We thought the best thing was to get things back to normal, as far as possible: we even did a couple of gigs, with one at Birmingham University turning out to be the last we ever played as Joy Division. We’d written two new songs while Ian was in hospital, ‘In a Lonely Place’ and ‘Ceremony’, which we thought would cheer him up, keep things moving forward and stop him from dwelling on the past.

  We performed these two songs for the first time in Birmingham. After that, we were due to head off for our first ever tour of America. Everyone was really excited about it. We’d been to France, Belgium and Germany, but this was different, this was America. I went into Manchester with Ian to buy some new clothes for the tour. He bought some horrible shoes, these suede winklepickers with laces on the heels, and I said to him, ‘Ian, they’re like dead men’s shoes.’ I don’t know why the fuck I said that.

  Around this time, we made the video for ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. Rob must have sensed there was something in the air, because he’d brought in a multitrack tape recorder to record the Birmingham show (it wasn’t a very good show, because we couldn’t hear ourselves on stage
) and then make the video. He asked a guy called Harry de Mack, a sound engineer who’d been working with us for a long, long time, to record the video and asked for the live tapes he’d asked Harry to record for us at a number of recent gigs. Harry announced that he wanted a very large sum of money for them, something Rob refused to entertain. Unsurprisingly, Harry didn’t show up for the video shoot. Never a band to do things the obvious way, we insisted on playing live at the recording of the video, setting up a PA at TJ Davidson’s, and so making it a considerable task to fit the images to the recorded version of the song. It worked out in the end, but it turned out to be some of the last footage of Ian ever filmed.

  We had friends in a band called Section 25, and they had their own problems: they were called that because one of the band members had once been sectioned by his own mother. They lived just outside Blackpool, near a river, and the weather forecast for the weekend before we were due to fly off to America was good. One of the Section 25 lads had the keys to his dad’s old speedboat, so Ian and I had made plans to go over there, go out with them on it and get a bit of sunshine: to city boys like us, this sounded a great idea. We were due to fly to America on the Monday and the plan, as I remember it, was that Ian and I would go down to see Section 25 on the Saturday, hang out with them, come back on Sunday and pack, ready to leave the next day. But after a couple of weeks staying with me Ian had decided that he was going to go to his parents’ house for a few days. I don’t think I was doing him much good, keeping him up all bloody night, to be honest; he could keep normal hours at his parents’. Just before we were due to leave for Blackpool, I had a call from him saying he wanted to go and see Debbie before leaving for America, so he wouldn’t come with me to see the guys from Section 25 after all. We arranged to meet at the airport.

  I went down and had a brilliant day. The speedboat was fantastic, I learned how to water-ski – badly – and it was great, really good fun, and a beautiful sunny day. We all went back to their house afterwards and I was in the kitchen at about four o’clock in the afternoon when the phone rang. One of the band answered and said, ‘Bernard, it’s for you, it’s Rob.’