Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

Bernard When you fought, what weapons did you use?

  Ian We use … [faintly] swords …

  Bernard What?

  Ian Sword … blade … pistols.

  Bernard Were you ever injured in a fight?

  Ian Yeah.

  Bernard Where were you hit?

  Ian In the leg.

  Bernard Which leg?

  Ian Twice in the right, once in the left … and … cuts on both arms … sides … all healed.

  Bernard What battle was that in?

  Ian It was in … France … and in … in Spain … and … they weren’t battles … fights.

  Bernard Fights? So was it an army you’d been fighting for?

  Ian Sometimes. Spain … where our army brought together … to fight … internally.

  Bernard The family you come from, is it a noble family?

  Ian No … not …

  Bernard What is the family name?

  Ian … not, not poor, though.

  Bernard What is the family name?

  Ian Father’s … English … it’s Cheacott.

  Bernard It’s what?

  Ian Cheacott.

  Bernard Tea cup?

  Ian Mother … was … Flemish.

  Bernard Flemish?

  Ian Mm. I forget the maiden name. Seems … a long time since …

  Bernard Relax. Just listen only to my voice, no other noises, my voice.

  [Tape pauses]

  Bernard What is your name?

  Ian Justin.

  Bernard Justin. Is there any memory in your life which particularly stands out, that you think about?

  Ian Just friends, people, good friends …

  Bernard Have you ever had any profession?

  Ian Not since I was very, very young.

  Bernard Where do you get your income from? Where do you get your money from?

  Ian Seem to save … require … a high salary. Whatever, lodgings, food, always provided.

  Bernard Why do they provide it?

  Ian Hired services.

  Bernard You hire your services. What as? What services?

  Ian Trained … soldier.

  Bernard How do you feel?

  Ian Very weak?

  Bernard Why do you feel weak?

  Ian Feverish, very very hot. Very … resigned to it.

  Bernard You’re resigned to it? What?

  Ian The end of it. It’s easy … I suppose.

  Bernard The end of your life? Would you say you’ve had a good life?

  Ian That’s not for me to, to judge.

  Bernard Who’s it for, to judge?

  Ian God.

  Bernard All right, I want you to go to the day, forward, to the day you die. Relax, because no harm can come to you. Don’t worry. Describe how you feel.

  Ian Hot.

  Bernard What?

  Ian Hot. Burning …

  Bernard What’s going through your mind?

  Ian Back … and forward.

  Bernard What do you mean?

  Ian I’m … gonna meet God … I won’t return to the … to the room. To die here … [inaudible] seems very final.

  Bernard Are you afraid?

  Ian No.

  Bernard I want you to go to the moment right after you died and tell me what you see … Or tell me what you feel.

  Ian [faintly] Just … emptiness … nothing …

  Bernard You don’t see anything?

  Ian [faintly] No.

  Bernard Do you feel anything?

  Ian [murmur]

  Bernard Yet you still exist …? Do you exist …?

  Ian [murmur]

  Bernard Never mind, just relax … Relax. And go further back in time. Further back through time. To another set of memories. Further back. Don’t worry, no harm can come to you. Further back through time to another set of memories. Tell me what you see.

  Ian A church.

  Bernard A church? What year is it?

  Ian Nine hundred … and four years after the death of Christ.

  Bernard What are you doing at the church?

  Ian Erm … priest … of … some kind.

  Bernard What is your name?

  Ian C— can’t see that. Seems very … can’t explain … er …

  Bernard Just relax and wait for things to clear … Just wait to get a vision. Just tell me what you can see.

  Ian Er, can just see a church.

  Bernard Nothing else?

  Ian Surrounded by countryside, grass, stands on its own, quite large … golden … stained windows, walls around, very large building.

  Bernard What are you wearing?

  Ian I c— can’t, can just the outside … of the church.

  Bernard Do you know who you are?

  Ian No … just a building, abbey.

  Bernard You’re a priest there?

  Ian I’m not sure. I know I, I live there.

  Bernard Never mind. Go deeper, right? Deeper into a sleep. Relax your mind. Relax your body. Don’t worry about anything. Relax your mind, relax your body, don’t worry about anything. Now going back further in time, further back in time, to another set of memories. Tell me what you see. Concentrate. Concentrate.

  Ian Erm … erm … can just see … unrelated …

  Bernard Unrelated what?

  Ian Just … images, pictures, I can’t …

  Bernard It doesn’t matter, don’t worry. Just try to explain how you feel in the images.

  Ian There’s a man walking over a hill. And there’s a field with lots of people dead.

  Bernard Dead?

  Ian But they’re not … doesn’t seem to be the same part of the country, countryside.

  Bernard What do you mean?

  Ian [faintly] Can’t …

  Bernard How you feel? … Is it any time?

  Ian I don’t know?

  Bernard You don’t know what this memory, memory relates to?

  Ian No.

  Bernard Or why it’s there. No?

  Ian No.

  Bernard So there’s just the fields … describe them again, just once more.

  Ian Someone walking over a hill, sunshine, and there’s a field with lots of people dead.

  Bernard And they’re covered in blood?

  Ian Flows red … flowed …

  Bernard Has the man done … done it?

  Ian No.

  Bernard Do you know who the man is?

  Ian No.

  Bernard Can you see yourself?

  Ian No.

  Bernard Can’t you even see your feet if you look down?

  Ian No.

  Bernard Can you touch yourself?

  Ian No.

  Bernard Does the field look real?

  Ian Yeah.

  Bernard Can you feel the grass? [pause] You can just see. OK then, just relax and listen to my voice, right? You understand? Can you hear my voice?

  Ian [murmur]

  Bernard I want you to come back forward, through time, to 1980, here in this room. Yeah? Do you know who you are now?

  Ian Yeah.

  Bernard What’s your name?

  Ian Ian.

  Bernard Now can you remember all I’ve been saying to you? All we’ve just talked about?

  Ian Erm … bits.

  Bernard About the different people? Memories that you had? The visions?

  Ian Can remember …

  Bernard What can you remember?

  Ian We talked about when I was little.

  Bernard But not before that?

  Ian Can remember seeing some pictures.

  Bernard What of?

  Ian Of a man on a hill … and … some kind of massacre … fight or something.

  Bernard Just recognize my voice. Now, I want you to consciously remember that when I wake you up, right?

  Ian Yeah.

  Bernard Well, I want you to remember that, right, always remember that.

  Ian Yeah.

  Bernard Remember all the memories you’ve had as you open your eyes and sit up.


  Ian Yeah.

  Bernard Right? So, now I want you to open your eyes and sit up. And … just remember everything. Right? But you’re perfectly OK. Perfectly relaxed. You’re going to wake up, totally wake up, right? You’re going to be totally awake. You’re not going to be in this sleep any more, you’re going to come out of this sleep. Can you hear me?

  Ian [faintly] Yeah.

  Bernard Sit up. How you feeling?

  Ian F— fine. [exhales]

  Bernard Can you remember anything?

  Ian I feel … I feel as if I’ve been dreaming … [inaudible] … you know like you remember a nightmare in the morning, when you’ve been dreaming … I remember being in a room … Can’t remember why I was there.

  Bernard Do you remember any feeling from being in that room?

  Ian Yeah … not a very nice smell … I shouldn’t have been there.

  Bernard You feel totally awake now?

  Ian Yeah … erm … I can remember this figure walking over a hill.

  Bernard What else about the hill?

  Ian Dunno, he was … just walking down.

  Bernard See a massacre? Bodies? [pause] You just feel like you’ve been dreaming?

  Ian Yeah, I feel like, you know when you wake up in the morning, and … there’s just bits, and the feeling of … bits … [inaudible]

  Bernard How long do you reckon you’ve been out for?

  Ian Ten minutes? [Bernard snorts] Twenty minutes? … Half an hour?

  Bernard You’ve been out for about … about an hour.

  Ian An hour?

  Bernard Perhaps an hour and a quarter.

  Ian [inaudible]

  Bernard It got really interesting. It’s all down on there.

  Ian Well, let’s have a listen to it then.

  Bernard Eh?

  [End of recording]

  Appendix Two:

  A Conversation with Alan Wise

  If you’ve been to our gigs in the UK or seen us at a festival, you may well have seen Alan Wise introducing us on stage. Alan is a promoter and impresario and has in the past managed acts like The Fall and Nico. People like Tony and Rob have always received most of the credit for their work on the Manchester scene – and rightly so – but Alan deserves to be spoken of in the same breath, as he’s also been hugely influential.

  I’ve known Alan for many years now and he’s a good friend of mine. He’s a delightfully eccentric, larger-than-life figure who has been a fixture on the Manchester scene since the earliest days of Joy Division.

  When I wanted to confirm a few things about the very early days of the Factory Club I went to Alan and soon realized that the best thing to do would be to let him tell his version of the story in his own words. So, one night towards the end of May 2014, he came to my house and we had a chat, which is reproduced here.

  Having characteristically nearly taken out my front wall while driving in, Alan lowered himself into a chair, sat almost supine with his trilby hat resting on his stomach like a bluebottle on a beach ball, and this conversation transpired.

  Bernard Alan, because you’re a special person, we’re going to let you have your voice in the book too.

  Alan Oh, lovely.

  Bernard I was finding it difficult to find the words to sum you up, so how would you sum yourself up in the context of the Manchester story?

  Alan Well. I wandered along, a lonely character who’d been ditched by a girlfriend, and I had a van which I used to do deliveries with. For the sake of finding some company I wandered down to Rafters, which was putting on punk groups, and allowed you to be a little bit eccentric. The owner of the place and still my flatmate and friend, Douglas Thomas James, said, ‘That’s a nice van, I could do with a van like that for my band.’ So he turned me into his roadie, though I was still a theology student at university. He had this club and we would go down to the club and get in for free, as we were with him. We could meet girls there and other boys. I did meet down there all the friends who are still my friends in later years. A lot of the people who were musicians were more sensitive and intelligent kinds of people.

  Bernard Mark E. Smith, for example?

  Alan Well, I didn’t know Mark at that time, but I met a lot of people there who were interesting, even though I may not have been a lover of that kind of music. I preferred blues, jazz and r ’n’ b and our DJ, Rob Gretton, was also a soul DJ, but we liked the movement of the crowd. There was a certain anarchy and freedom there that record companies and promoters didn’t control.

  Bernard What years would this be?

  Alan Seventy-six. I quickly fell in with a group called Slaughter and the Dogs and did their first tour, Slaughter Bite Back. Then, after that, I made friends with the Buzzcocks and then with yourselves.

  Bernard Was that a two-way friendship?

  Alan Yeah, I was very close to Shelley [Pete Shelley; lead singer], and all that. They were very nice people. Working with and going out on the road with groups, getting out, cured my depression, because I was very depressed about this girl leaving me. She was a lovely German girl, a dentist from the university. We got engaged and her parents came over to meet me. Her dad was an old SS officer – he’d still click his boots like Prussian nobility when he stood – who joked about how the Russians had had him against the wall ready for shooting but were so incompetent he had waltzed off and escaped. While he was laughing about this, my dad was searching the basement for his old army revolver to finish the job. Her father’s advice to his daughter on meeting me, was ‘Flee! Flee! He is a bohemian!’ Which I am, and I took it as a compliment. He thought it meant the lowest dog on earth. He took her back to Germany with him. Anyway, I wandered down into this world and, while at Manchester University, I went for something to eat each day at a café run by a South American bloke. I’d seen people there slightly older than us called Music Force. Music Force had a young girl working the phone each day, doing nothing very much, and I had a crush on her. I used to go and see her and while there, I thought, I can do this, I can do this job as well, and then the two things tied up: what Music Force were doing and then …

  Bernard Wasn’t Music Force something to do with Martin Hannett?

  Alan Yes. There were three people: Martin Hannett, Tosh Ryan and Bruce Mitchell. I became friends with Martin, and later Bruce Mitchell, and later Tosh Ryan.

  Bernard The bit we’re interested in is not prehistory, so to speak, we’re interested in starting at the Russell Club, say …

  Alan OK, well, it pre-dated the Russell Club because my first memories of you are at Rafters. You were an amusing chap, far from the dour image of the band. Songwriters normally have some creativity and sensitivity; you were as rude as me and for those reasons we bonded. You had a good sense of humour but always seemed to be broke, even when your band could sell twenty thousand tickets. I could never figure it out. When they all went bust you did get a sum, with which you bought a little refuge for the sick and needy, and I used to go round there every week with this week’s girlfriend. Anyway, back then you used to come and play as Warsaw, and …

  Bernard I don’t think we played many gigs as Warsaw.

  Alan Well, you did a couple and maybe did a couple as Joy Division – whatever it was, I’ve forgotten. But we all thought it was very good, and Rob Gretton in particular thought it was very good. Joy Division did it differently for a bit: you had a style and a philosophy, you weren’t boring businessmen. You were for a time the real thing and that’s why a critical young audience liked you. The groups were all known by Rob Gretton and Nigel Bagley; they knew the scene more than we did. Although we knew about other kinds of music, we were not really au fait at that time with the up-and-coming punk and new-wave groups. My favourite thing we put on was Elvis Costello, but we didn’t really know the others, and Rob knew the scene, Bagley knew the scene and there was …

  Bernard What would you describe yourself as in those days?

  Alan I was the beginnings of an impresario, but really I was running th
e Factory Club. My actual position was roadie for Dougie James.

  Bernard So, you were a roadie but you saw yourself as an impresario.

  Alan Well, I was more than his roadie; I was the manager, effectively. Then I started putting on the other groups we saw when we were running the club. I didn’t take a wage for two years, but we started to get to know the groups. Dougie was hopeless, because he used to go down to the casino and gamble away all the money. Our office was …

  Bernard That’s what you do now, isn’t it?

  Alan Er, yeah. But we had nice offices, you’ll remember them, above Rafters and the club upstairs, Fagan’s. Often Mr Hook and yourselves used to turn up. Peter was actually very active in pushing for gigs and he wanted to play there as often as possible. We kept the club going for a couple of years, and then Tony …

  Bernard This was Rafters?

  Alan Yeah. Tony came down to Rafters. He didn’t have much idea about music, he liked 10CC and that other Manchester group, Sad Café, all long hair and saddlebags, but he noticed there was a new type of group playing.

  Bernard That’s not true, because Tony had a programme where he wasn’t putting on bands like 10CC …

  Alan Yeah, but he came to the indie pop thing afterwards, when he saw it was coming into fashion. He had a good sense of what would become fashionable, but he didn’t start the fashion. The fashion was started by earlier people like yourselves and Shelley, and the other people who started it, who copied it from whoever you copied it from.

  Bernard Jumping forward to the Factory Club in Hulme, Don Tonay was a shadowy figure.

  Alan Don was actually quite an erudite gangster who’d been involved in political activities all over Africa. He went off to be a paratrooper and had been involved with certain members of the African National Congress. He’d gone to Africa and dealt in iron pyrites, fool’s gold. Don was a fascinating character, and I really took to him. My uncle was the Attorney General, so Don thought it was very funny to have someone whose uncle was the Attorney General working for him. He got me to be the licensee of the club because he needed a licensee, that’s the first time …

  Bernard So Don Tonay was involved in this political intrigue and …

  Alan He was a pirate.

  Bernard Didn’t he have something to do with a shebeen in Moss Side?

  Alan Yeah, he ran two shebeens, the Nile and the Reno.

  Bernard So Don Tonay …

  Alan ‘Shebeen’ is the Irish word for an illegal drinking club.