Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  Whenever we played in LA he’d come and see us, and we’d go and visit him at his house in Bel Air: one night when we turned up, Natassja Kinski answered the door and cooked us dinner. I remember another occasion, when we were having a drink in his den downstairs and he said to me, ‘Come and listen to this, Bernard.’ He pressed play on his answering machine and it was Marlon Brando. ‘Hey, Quincy,’ said the voice of Colonel Kurtz, ‘have you ever thought … about the beautiful gardenias … that grow … in the park …’

  We liked Quincy a great deal, and his label seemed exactly the right place for us. He never put any pressure on us, didn’t get in our way and even ended up remixing ‘Blue Monday’ for us in 1988. He made a really good job of it, as it’s a very difficult track to mix (other than Quincy, Hardfloor produced a mix called ‘Blauer Montag’, which I particularly liked).

  In signing to Qwest, we found ourselves not only with roots in New York but in Los Angeles as well. We were made very welcome: when we first signed we were invited to the Warner Brothers’ LA offices to meet the people involved and be welcomed into the family. They threw a big party for us. No one told us this; we thought we were just saying hello to a couple of people there. I remember Tom Atencio walking up to a door, grasping the handle and saying to me, ‘Are you ready, Bernard?’ I said, ‘What for?’ and he opened the door to reveal this big room full of about four hundred cheering people.

  At first I found LA very alien. It’s a long flight and, as you fly in, you pass over this seemingly endless cityscape of flat roofs that goes on and on; it felt like flying from Manchester to London, only with buildings the whole way. Usually, we’d stay in a hotel called the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood, a real party hotel in the early eighties, but then, every other hotel within spitting distance had a similar reputation: John Belushi died in the Chateau Marmont just up the road around that time. On our early American sojourns we’d stay in downbeat places: there’d be AstroTurf everywhere, and when we watched TV the picture was supposed to be colour but was actually just different shades of brown. Those lower-end hotels seemed to have two types of bed as selling points – waterbeds, or beds that vibrated. Rob loved the latter kind, and he always chose a place with vibrating beds. He’d lie on it watching some terrible film on the television, drinking beer, smoking, eating heavily buttered English muffins, reaching occasionally over to a pile of quarters on the bedside table and feeding them into the slot to keep the bed vibrating. Hooky and I would wait around like vultures, because he’d pay us $15 to go and get him $30 worth of beer and some more quarters.

  The next level of hotel up for Rob involved automatic revolving doors, the sort with sensors that would start the door turning as you approached. If a hotel didn’t have these, Rob would pronounce it ‘a shit hotel’ and, next time, no matter how good or convenient a hotel it was, we’d have to stay somewhere else.

  Sometimes it wasn’t the hotel itself that was the issue, it could be the people we met there. I remember one time on tour in 1985 when we flew down to New Orleans. We arrived at the hotel after a long flight – and a longer night of partying – when Ruth Polsky told us all to meet downstairs at eight o’clock. None of us felt in the slightest bit sociable, but Ruth insisted we had to meet the promoter and it would be bad form if we didn’t.

  We all trooped downstairs at the appointed time, and at the bar we found a giant of a man with an enormous beard and a look in his eye that you felt could turn milk sour at forty paces. Ruth introduced him as the promoter, but he held up a massive, meaty hand and said, ‘I’m not the promoter. I’m the promoter’s representative.’

  Then he turned to the barman and barked, ‘Eight vodka shots.’ I don’t like vodka and, still feeling the effects of the previous night, was reluctant to start drinking at all, let alone something I didn’t like.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t really drink vodka,’ I said meekly. ‘Could I get a Pernod instead, please?’

  The promoter’s representative turned to look at me. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘These are for me.’

  He proceeded to knock back all eight vodkas, one after the other.

  We sat at the bar for a while chatting to this guy, when suddenly he said, ‘You,’ indicating me, ‘come with me, I want to take you somewhere.’

  We walked out of the hotel to find police cars everywhere, sirens going, the lot. There’d been some kind of incident, but the promoter’s representative was unfazed. We walked straight past the police cars and disappeared behind a wall, where he pulled out a massive bowie knife with a blade about ten inches long. Oh fuck, I thought, what’s he doing?

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wrap of strange white powder, poured some on to the blade of the knife and offered it to me, all with a dozen cops a few feet away on the other side of the wall. Perhaps it was the alcohol, I don’t know, but later on I somehow felt much more confident and self-assured, and we went back to the bar, where more and more drink was taken before I suggested we get something to eat. ‘No,’ said the man mountain. ‘We’re going to meet the promoter now.’

  We got into a fleet of taxis, drove out of the nice part of New Orleans and kept going into the night, watching the streetlights disappear and the houses grow farther and farther apart. Eventually, we arrived at a patch of wasteland, in the middle of which stood a solitary house floodlit by security lights and surrounded by a wire fence, around which bounded some fearsome-looking canines. A few nervous glances were exchanged as the cars stopped just long enough for us to climb out, before hightailing it back into the night as a guy unlocked the gate to let us in. The wire fence looked suddenly very flimsy as the dogs went berserk at us from behind it.

  Once inside the door – and away from the dogs – we found the house quiet. There was a big spiral staircase in the middle of the living room we’d been shown into, down which came a scantily clad woman, followed by a man wearing a silk dressing gown, who we took to be the promoter. He was the absolute spit of Gomez from The Addams Family. ‘We wanted to welcome you to our city,’ he said, smiling, spreading his arms wide and insisting we had a drink. ‘You like bourbon? Have some bourbon.’ We didn’t like bourbon but felt it best, in the circumstances, not to point this out. Then the man who’d met us at the hotel appeared with a big bag of this white stuff. He said to Gomez, ‘This is the stuff left over from the Miami run.’ Gomez seemed to find this agreeable and out came the bowie knife again.

  I asked Gomez if he was the promoter. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Not me. I’m the promoter’s representative. There are two of them, as it happens, and they live out in the swamps. Don’t worry, they’re coming to the gig tomorrow.’

  We did the gig the following night – it wasn’t a great one – and when we got back to the dressing room the man with the bowie knife arrived at the door, concerned that there was ‘a problem’ with our security guy. The security guy was, of course, Terry, and he wouldn’t let the promoters come backstage.

  A few minutes later, the promoters walked into the dressing room, and they were like no promoters we’d ever seen before: both of them were wearing caps with the confederate flag on the front, and dressed head to toe in denim. Their jeans were rolled up, there wasn’t a shoe between them and their bare feet were encrusted with mud from the bayous. It really was like something out of Deliverance. They insisted we went back to the same house for a party, where, in the meantime, a drum kit had been set up. It was clear that we were supposed to have a jam session, but none of us could jam – we never jammed and didn’t know how! We never saw them again after that: maybe the next Miami run didn’t go quite to plan.

  Before the Sunset Marquis, we’d stayed at the Tropicana, a famous old rock ’n’ roll motel in LA (The Doors apparently used to practically live there, Andy Warhol made a couple of films at the Tropicana and at one stage Tom Waits was a long-term resident). We never usually stayed in rock ’n’ roll hotels, but someone had suggested it, probably Tony, who wanted us to stay in landmark hotels that fam
ous bands had visited. (He liked the Chelsea Hotel in New York, for example, which in those days was a fucking horrible fleapit – I once stayed in a room there that was like something out of a David Lynch film.)

  The Tropicana was also famous for Duke’s Coffee Shop downstairs, where Hollywood stars would go and eat, slumming it, because the food was supposed to be amazing. Well, maybe it was, but the room our roadie Dave Pils, Peter Hook and I shared was right above the kitchen, and what we didn’t realize until after we’d settled in was that we were sharing it with about three thousand cockroaches. We had to tuck the sheets under the mattress all the way around so the cockroaches couldn’t crawl under them. There’d be what looked like a Milky Way of them all up the walls as you lay in bed, and if you went to the toilet in the middle of the night and lifted the lid you’d see them all scuttling away. Until they’d got used to you, that is, at which point sitting on the toilet became a very interesting affair.

  Steve and Gillian were lucky, because they were given the room with the vodka-drinking flies. Because our room was so disgusting we’d go to theirs to party, and Steve showed me that if you put your drinks down the flies would all go for the vodka and orange, no other drink. The Tropicana was a rotten hotel – and we’d stayed in some bad ones over the years – but the people in the coffee shop below, film stars included, can have had no idea the place was infested with cockroaches. I can only begin to imagine what horrors the kitchen must have contained. At one point I complained to the guy at reception. He just started laughing and said, ‘What the fuck do you want me to do about it?’ It was a classy joint, that’s for sure. I understand it was demolished towards the end of the eighties, and there’s a chain hotel there now. For its sake, I hope the cockroaches died with the Tropicana.

  This added to my mixed feelings about Los Angeles. For one thing, coming from Salford, I found the fact it was sunny all the time particularly strange. For another, being guys in our twenties, we took full advantage of the LA party scene, got ourselves in a complete mess every night and blamed the repercussions and hangovers on the city itself rather than the true culprits: ourselves.

  Having had such a confused relationship with Los Angeles back then, now, years later, I have a completely different perspective and see the city with much clearer vision. It’s just a nice city full of nice people.

  One strong memory I have of those times is a recording session we did in LA with Arthur and John for Pretty In Pink in the same studio in which Fleetwood Mac had recorded Tusk. Just outside the studio was a lounge in which the bands could relax and unwind, which Fleetwood Mac had decorated in the style of an English stately home. It had oak-panelled walls that had been imported from England and was very sumptuous, but the drawback was that it had no windows. In an attempt to compensate for this, the ceiling had been constructed using backlit Perspex which simulated the passing of the day. When you arrived in the morning it would be yellow, then, as the day progressed, it would go white, blue, then pink, orange for the sunset and finally a darkening blue for the night. Which, strangely, sort of worked.

  The studio engineer was one of those quintessential LA guys to whom everything is ‘fuckin’ great, man’. ‘This track is fuckin’ awesome,’ he’d gush. ‘The best fuckin’ thing I’ve ever heard, and you guys are doing a fuckin’ ah-maz-ing job.’

  We weren’t used to this. Being English, we were used to the engineer scowling at us through the glass for the entire duration of the session. Of course, we knew he didn’t mean a single word of it, and he knew that we knew he didn’t mean a single word of it. I think he grated more on the nerves of Arthur and John, because they were proper East Coast guys with an eye-rolling ‘fuck this LA shit’ attitude to such relentless vacuous positivity.

  One day, the engineer started telling us how the track sounded ‘fuckin’ great, it’s nearly fuckin’ perfect, and what would make it perfect is some fuckin’ percussion’. We said, ‘Thanks for that, mate, but we really don’t want any percussion on it if it’s all the same to you.’ He’d keep bringing it up, though, until eventually he said, ‘Tell you what, I’ll call my guy. He’s fuckin’ ah-maz-ing, he’s played with everyone and would really make this track.’ We finally relented – for a quiet life as much as anything – and the engineer made his call. The percussionist turned up, and he was a proper hippie: long hair, hippie clothes, Cuban heels and a canvas sack over his shoulder. He put the sack on the table and all his percussion instruments spilled out. He picked up the cabasa, unscrewed the end and tipped the contents on to the table – a small mountain of white powder. I think this was what the engineer meant by ‘improving the track’. The percussionist said he had a present for us, handed us some leaves and said, ‘Chew on these.’ So we did. They were quite peppery, but whatever they were, they numbed our tongues and ensured we couldn’t even think about eating: our appetites were hammered down for the next twenty-four hours.

  Unfortunately, we were supposed to be having dinner that night with Quincy’s representative, Harold Childs, a black guy from LA who was the quintessential English gentleman, to the point of smoking a pipe. He was lovely, we really liked him, but there we were, never having met each other before, dining at an upmarket restaurant, and none of us could eat a thing. This was the inaugural ‘welcome to Qwest’ dinner Harold had thrown for us in one of LA’s top fine-dining restaurants. He’d ordered all this amazing food and we couldn’t eat any of it; we just pushed it round our plates and smiled as politely as we could.

  But that was LA in the mid-eighties. We had fun, and lots of it. I’ve matured since those days and am no longer like a kid in a sweet shop. I realized long ago that too many sweets will make your teeth drop out.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I’ve got an idea

  While we’d been busy absorbing the influences of the clubs in New York (cleverly disguised as just going out and having a good time), closer to home, we had somehow ended up with a club of our own.

  In the early eighties there had been a Factory club night once or twice a week at the Russell Club in Hulme. It was run by Tony Wilson, Alan Erasmus and a charismatic character called Alan Wise, who you may have seen introducing us on stage at gigs and festivals (see Appendix 2). The Factory Club booked a range of bands such as Cabaret Voltaire, Gang of Four, The Durutti Column, The Human League, Throbbing Gristle, Public Image Ltd, The Raincoats, Teardrop Explodes … at one point they even brought Suicide over from America. They were essentially bands that Tony and the two Alans found interesting, and it was always a fun night. They’d book local acts too: A Certain Ratio, Section 25 and ourselves all played at the Russell Club, and we all agreed it was a fantastic thing. Eventually, it came to an end – I’ve been told it was to do with a large and growing debt to the brewery, but it’s also possible it had become so successful that Tony decided a couple of nights a week at the Russell wasn’t enough and it was time to buy a nightclub of their own. Either way, the seeds of the Haçienda were sown in the sticky carpets of the Russell Club.

  At some point in the early eighties we must have started making a fair bit of money (as a band, we were never kept informed about such trifling matters). Coincidentally, this is when talk turned to buying a club. The main lobbyists in favour of opening the Haçienda were Rob, Tony and the DJ Mike Pickering, a good friend of Rob’s and someone who remains to this day a good friend of the band. In 1982 they came to us and said, ‘We’ve found this fantastic place on Whitworth Street in Manchester. It used to be a yacht showroom and would be perfect for a club. Are you interested?’ We remembered how great the old Factory club had been, visualized something similar and said yes, we were definitely interested. What we didn’t appreciate before we saw the venue was the sheer scale of the place – and certainly not the extent of the costs. Neither Rob nor Tony ever showed us any financial projections or business plans: for a start, we assumed they were looking at a part of the building, not all of it. We were also unaware that the whole thing was a fait accompli, engineered by Tony
.

  Of the Factory directors, Alan Erasmus and Martin Hannett were against it. Having been involved in the running of the Factory night at the Russell Club, Alan was keenly aware how much time and effort would be involved and the difficulties that would have to be overcome. He knew it would detract from the core function of Factory, which was, after all, to put records out. There was a meeting at Tony’s house in Didsbury and the vote was Tony and Rob in favour, Alan and Martin against. This left Peter Saville with the casting vote, but he lived in London at that point and couldn’t be at the meeting. What I gather from Alan Erasmus is that Tony phoned Peter and buttered him up to the extent that he saw no alternative but to vote in favour of the Haçienda. It would have been nice if maybe the band had had the casting vote, but we weren’t even aware this meeting was happening.

  Under Rob’s guiding hand, the then fledgling New Order, and Factory, under Tony, became partners in the project and somehow found the money for the start-up costs, presumably from our Joy Division income.

  We were never told about the detail to any great extent; in fact, at one point early in the planning stages I was deputized by the band to find out from Rob and Tony exactly what was happening. It seemed to take them a little by surprise; they didn’t understand why we’d want to know. They seemed genuinely mystified as to why we would be interested in where a big chunk of the money we were earning might be going. I left without much of an answer and, to a great extent, we left them to it. Our laissez-faire attitude may seem strange in retrospect: we should probably have asked some more pertinent questions, but the reason we didn’t seek to become more involved at the outset was that our role was to take care of the music. Rob took care of business, and we trusted him implicitly. We knew how to write songs; he knew how to write cheques. It’s possible he thought opening the club would be a great way of getting money out of Factory.