by Peter Hook
I’ve always read the Manchester Evening News cover to cover, ever since I was a kid. Don’t ask me why. Same with watching Coronation Street; it’s just something I’ve always done. Home is Becky and the kids, Corrie and the MEN.
Reading the small ads in the MEN was how I found out that the Pistols were playing at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, 50p a ticket.
Now my mates – and I mean this in the nicest possible way – have always been dead normal, so they weren’t interested. But I’d been going to gigs with Terry and Bernard and (apart from the infamous toothache incident) having a laugh, so I phoned Bernard up.
‘The Sex Pistols are on – do you want to go and see them?’
He went, ‘Who?’
I said, ‘Oh, it’s this group. They have fights at every gig and it’s really funny. Come on, it’s only 50p.’
‘Yeah, all right, then.’
Terry was up for it too, so it ended up being me, him, Barney and Sue Barlow, who was Barney’s fiancé. I think they’d met at Gresty’s house when he was sixteen or so. They’d been going out for a few years and used to fight like cat and dog. With the possible exception of Debbie and Ian, they had the most tempestuous, argumentative relationship I’ve ever known in my life. And they ended up getting married . . .
So that was it anyway, the group of us who went and saw the Sex Pistols at Lesser Free Trade Hall. A night that turned out to be the most important of my life – or one of them at least – but that started out just like any other: me and Terry making the trip in Terry’s car; Barney and Sue arriving on his motorbike; the four of us meeting up then ambling along to the ticket office.
There to greet us was Malcolm McLaren, dressed head to toe in black leather – leather jacket, leather trousers and leather boots – with a shock of bright-orange hair, a manic grin and the air of a circus ringmaster, though there was hardly anyone else around. We were like, Wow. He looked so wild, from another planet even. The four of us were in our normal gear: flared jeans, penny collars and velvet jackets with big lapels, all of that. Look at the photographs of the gig and you can see that everybody in the audience was dressed the same way, like a Top of the Pops audience. There were no punks yet. So Malcolm – he looked like an alien to us. Thinking about it, he must have been the first punk I ever saw in the flesh.
Wide-eyed we paid him, went in and down the stairs into the Lesser Free Trade Hall (the same stairs I’d laid down on many years before). At the back of the hall was the stage and set out in front of it were chairs, on either side of a central walkway, just like it was in 24 Four Hour Party People – although I don’t remember many sitting down like they are in the film. I don’t think there was a bar that night, so we just stood around, waiting.
The support band were called Solstice, and their best number was a twenty-minute cover version of ‘Nantucket Sleighride’. The original, by Mountain, was one of my favourite records at the time so we knew it really well, and we were like, ‘This is great. Just like the record.’
Still, though, nothing out of the ordinary. Normal band, normal night, few people watching, clap-clap, very good, off they went.
The Sex Pistols’ gear was set up and then, without further ceremony, they came on: Johnny Rotten, Glen Matlock, Steve Jones and Paul Cook. Steve Jones was wearing a boiler suit and the rest of them looked like they’d just vandalized an Oxfam shop. Rotten had on this torn-open yellow sweater and he glared out into the audience like he wanted to kill each and every one of us, one at a time, before the band struck up into something that might have been ‘Did You No Wrong’ but you couldn’t tell because it was so loud and dirty and distorted.
I remember feeling as though I’d been sitting in a darkened room all of my life – comfortable and warm and safe and quiet – then all of a sudden someone had kicked the door in, and it had burst open to let in an intense bright light and this even more intense noise, showing me another world, another life, a way out. I was immediately no longer comfortable and safe, but that didn’t matter because it felt great. I felt alive. It was the weirdest sensation. It wasn’t just me feeling it, either – we were all like that. We just stood there, stock still, watching the Pistols. Absolutely, utterly, gobsmacked.
I was thinking two things. Two things that I suppose you’d have to say came together to create my future – my whole life from then on.
The first was: I could do that.
Because, fucking hell, what a racket. I mean, they were just dreadful; well, the sound was dreadful. Now the other band didn’t sound that bad. They sounded normal. But it was almost as though the Pistols’ sound guy had deliberately made them sound awful, or they had terrible equipment on purpose, because it was all feeding back, fuzzed-up, just a complete din. A wall of noise. I didn’t recognize a tune, not a note, and considering they were playing so many cover versions – the Monkees, the Who – I surely would have recognized something had it not sounded so shit.
So, in fact, sound-wise it was as much the sound guy who inspired us all as it was the Sex Pistols, who were, as much as I hate to say it, a pretty standard rock band musically. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that they played straightforward down-the-line rock ‘n’ roll, but it didn’t make them special.
No. What made them special, without a shadow of a doubt, was Johnny Rotten. The tunes were only a part of the package – and probably the least important part of it, if I’m honest. Close your eyes and like I say you had a conventional pub-rock band with a soundman who either didn’t have a clue or was being very clever indeed. But who was going to close their eyes when he, Johnny Rotten, was standing there? Sneering and snarling at you, looking at you like he hated you, hated being there, hated everyone. What he embodied was the attitude of the Pistols, the attitude of punk. Through him they expressed what we wanted to express, which was complete nihilism. You know the way you feel when you’re a teenager, all that confusion about the future that turns to arrogance and then rebellion, like, ‘Fuck off, we don’t fucking care, we’re shit, we don’t care’? He had all of that and more.
And, God bless him, whatever he had, he gave a bit of it to us, because that was the second thing I felt, after I can do that. It was: I want to do that. No . I fucking need to do that.
Tony Wilson said he was there, of course, but I didn’t see him, which is weird because he was very famous in Manchester then; he was Tony Wilson off the telly. Mick Hucknall was there, and Mark E. Smith and everyone, but of course we didn’t know anybody – all that would come later. The only people we knew there were each other: me and Terry, Barney and Sue. I don’t know what Sue made of it all, mind you; I’d love to know now. But me, Barney and Terry were being converted.
The Pistols were on for only about half an hour and when they finished we filed out quietly with our minds blown, absolutely utterly speechless, and it just sort of dawned on me then – that was it. That was what I wanted to do: tell everyone to Fuck Off.
‘Is that a bass guitar?’
On the way home that night we decided to form a band. If they can do it, we said, meaning the Pistols, then so can we.
We decided to follow the rules of punk . . .
Rule one: act like the Sex Pistols.
Rule two: look like the Sex Pistols. One guitar, one bass.
Terry volunteered to be the singer. Barney had been given a guitar and a little red practice amp for Christmas, which made him the guitarist, so I thought, ‘Right, I’ll get a bass.’
Of course I’m pleased it worked out like that because I ended up learning the bass guitar, really making it my own and developing a very distinctive style, whereas (who knows?) if I’d tried learning the guitar I might just have been a bog-standard rhythm guitarist. It’s one of the strange things about writing a book like this, actually. You start seeing your life as series of chance happenings that somehow come together to make you what you are. You start thinking, What if I hadn’t come back from Jamaica? What if I hadn’t bought that week’s Melody Maker or seen the advert for th
e Sex Pistols in the Manchester Evening News? What if Barney’s parents had bought him a Johnny Seven for his birthday instead of a guitar.
But they didn’t. They bought him a guitar so I became a bassist. The very next day I borrowed £40 off my mam, and got the bus to Mazel’s on London Road, Piccadilly, in Manchester. I had no idea how much guitars cost. But I think Barney’s was about £40. Mazel Radio was one of those shops that always felt dark, it was that filled with weird indecipherable stock. (I used to go there with Terry for fun most weekends.) It was an Aladdin’s cave stuffed with transistors, valves, accumulators, TVs, radios – all kinds of electrical doo-dahs.
And cheap guitars.
‘Can I have one of those, please?’ I said, pointing at them.
‘Well, what kind do you want, son?’ said the bloke behind the counter.
‘A bass one.’
And he went, ‘Well, how about this one?’
‘Is that a bass guitar?
‘Yeah.’
‘That’ll do.’
So I bought my first guitar, which I’ve still got: a Gibson EB-0 copy. No make on it. They tried to sell me a case but after bus fare I didn’t have enough money so I took it home in a black bin liner they fished out from behind the counter. Very punk.
Barney had been playing a bit so he showed me a couple of notes. He’d go, ‘Hold your finger there then move your finger to there. Move your finger back . . .’
We were off. Not long later, we got books on how to play: the Palmer-Hughes Book of Rock ‘n’ Roll Guitar and Rock ‘n’ Roll Bass Guitar. Mine came with stickers for the neck of the bass so you knew where to put your fingers. When the stickers wore off with sweat, I painted them on with Tippex. We’d be sitting round practising, with Barney shouting out the chords, like, ‘Play A, A, A, A, and then we’ll change to G, G, G, G.’ I’d practise by myself, too, but it was far more interesting learning together than it was playing on your own at home.
Teaching myself meant I ended up learning it wrong, though, because I picked up the bad habit of playing with three fingers. A teacher would have made me play with four, but the Palmer-Hughes Book of Rock ‘n’ Roll Bass Guitar didn’t talk back so I started off – and have ended up – a three-fingered bass player; and having to hold down my little finger as I play makes me slower. Saying that, I suppose it also gave me my style, which is slower and more melodic compared to most bassists’. It’s a different way of playing, and it came through learning badly.
We began by practising in Barney’s gran’s front room. I told you she was a lovely lady. She had an old stereogram record player, and Barney, who was always good with electronics, wired up our guitar leads to the two input wires on the needle cartridge so we could play through it. It worked as well. I mean, it sounded fucking diabolical, and if we both played at the same time you couldn’t hear anything but a wall of noise, but it worked. So we’d made it, we’d arrived – right up until his gran discovered that we’d wrecked her stereo and went berserk and threw us out. Then we ran down Alfred Street laughing.
But we didn’t care. We were punks. We raided Oxfam and cut up the clothes we stole; I spiked up my hair and took the dog collar off the dog to wear. My mam went mad yet again. At first we were just copying the look from Melody Maker and NME, and wearing what the London punks were wearing, but pretty soon we were developing our own style. Barney discovered the Scout shop on New Mount Street and started wearing a more military look (typical of him, he wanted to be a neat-and-tidy punk) while I used masking tape on my blue blazer to put stripes on it, and we both sprayed prison arrows on our clothes.
You used to get shouted at in the street for dressing like that; you were given the right leper treatment. I mean, these days nobody would bat an eyelid, but back then it was really shocking to see these kids walking round with hair in spikes and their clothes cut up. Which was, of course, why we did it – we wanted to be shocking; we wanted people staring at us. We loved that our mums hated it and that we had to get changed on the bus. It was all part of being a punk.
This was it for us: we’d get the guitars out, play around for a bit, go out so that people in the street could treat us like lepers, then come back and play around on the guitars some more. It was great.
The next punk happening in Manchester was the Pistols’ second gig, on 20 July, also at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Apart from the venue it was completely different: for a start, we were punks now and knew what to expect from the band; plus there were a lot more people there, not only because the word had spread in Manchester but also because the Pistols, unless I’m very much mistaken, had brought a coachload with them, which was exciting straight away. At that time if you put a group of Cockneys and a group of Mancs into a municipal building at the same time, a fight was bound to break out – which it did.
We were in the bar talking to these kids who were from Manchester. They’d come over to us, one of them going, ‘Hey, are you fucking Cockneys or what?’ all up in our faces.
And we went, ‘No, fuck off, mate, we’re from Salford.’
‘Oh, right. Well, we’re from Wythenshawe. We’re a group.’
‘Oh, right. We’re a group, too. Sort of.’
‘Well, we’re Slaughter & the Dogs. We’re supporting tonight.’
Wow – it was Slaughter & the Dogs; and this bloke’s name was Mick Rossi, the guitarist. Slaughter & the Dogs were one of the earliest punk bands in Manchester – it was them and the Buzzcocks, who were also playing that night.
‘What’s your group called?’ said Mick Rossi.
We looked at each other. ‘Dunno. We haven’t got a name yet.’
Didn’t have a name. Didn’t have songs. Didn’t have a lead singer unless you counted Terry, which – after a couple of disastrous practice sessions – we didn’t. But still, we were a band.
‘Right, the Cockneys are here,’ said Rossi. ‘We’re having the Cockneys, we’re fucking having them.’
And this was the support band. So there was a hell of an atmosphere right from the beginning and, true to form, there was as much fighting as there was pogoing and moshing, everyone rolling around the room. It was more good-natured than you might have expected, but, even so, pretty chaotic and, because it was all going off, a lot more exciting than the first gig. At the first gig it all went off on stage. At the second gig it all went off in the audience and on stage.
Looking back, I don’t know which of the gigs was the most important in terms of the influence it had. A lot of people say the second because there were more people there, the Pistols were better known and punks had started to get going in the city, but for me and Barney it was the first because that’s when we decided to form the group. Overall I think you’d have to say they were both as important as each other. I mean, after those two gigs, bands had formed and venues were putting them on and there was a group of us who soaked up whatever punk we could. That autumn we saw the Stranglers at the Squat on Devas Street; in September, Eater played the first-ever gig, at Houldsworth Hall on Deansgate. Eater were supported by the Buzzcocks, who played at just about every gig in Manchester and were also doing a lot to help other punk bands find their feet. They’d encouraged us; their manager, Richard Boon, had come up with our first name, the Stiff Kittens, and later we found out that Ian had been in touch with them too. Together with the Drones and Slaughter & the Dogs they were the backbones of the punk scene and helped make Manchester the major punk city after London. They all played regularly at the Squat and at a gay bar on Dale Street called the Ranch, owned by Foo Foo Lamar, as well as at the Electric Circus in Collyhurst Street, which quickly became the city’s main punk venue.
Debbie Curtis remembers Ian talking to me and Barney at that second Pistols gig. (He wasn’t there for the first one, which he was always a bit pissed off about, but he brought Debbie along to the second.) Maybe we did share a few words that night but he certainly didn’t really register with me then. The first time I remember Ian making an impact was at the Electric Circus,
for the third Pistols gig. He had ‘Hate’ written on his jacket in orange fluorescent paint. I liked him straight away.
‘He was just a kid with “Hate” on his coat’
The Electric Circus was an older, normal rock venue, in that it was a redbrick building, with a pointed roof like a church. The front door opened into one big, dark room with a high ceiling. The bar was on the right-hand side and there was a balcony, which I never saw open. In fact, the only reason I knew it had a balcony was that I was mooching around one night – this was later, when we were Warsaw – and somehow we got on to it, and there sat the Drones’ PA.
By that time the Drones were like Slaughter & the Dogs – real fucking mouthy, football-hooligan types, and we hated them. I mean, with the exception of the Buzzcocks, who were like the father figures of Manchester punk, all the bands hated one another and were forever trying to get one over on each other, and Slaughter & the Dogs and the Drones were the worst of the lot. The second time the Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall, Slaughter & the Dogs had their own posters made up that had their name above the Pistols’ and missed out the Buzzcocks altogether. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Horrible twats. They made us look like angels. The Drones were just as bad. So . . . Well, let’s just say something happened to their equipment. Something nasty.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that, once we’d put our knobs away, I knew there was a balcony in the Electric Circus.
Even before the Pistols played there the Circus was a big punk venue; and because there was only that and the Ranch, which was a punk club on Thursday nights, you got to start recognizing all the punks because they were going to the same two places on the same nights. The people who stuck out tended to be the well-known ones, like the Buzzcocks and Slaughter & the Dogs, or the guys with big personalities – people like John the Postman, the noisy bastard. Me and Barney were pretty quiet. We’d just stand on the side-lines and not get noticed, but you’d see the faces and you’d let on. ‘All right, mate, how are you?’ something like that. People got to know you.