Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook

  Fucking tosser – ‘the guitarist who comes from Salford’? Two of us came from Salford. I was really annoyed. I was proud of my roots, whereas Bernard always played them down.

  It was a momentous day, though. Rob again decided that we needed to invest in ourselves and took us to town shopping. We all got new shirts to wear on Granada Reports. Two pounds fifty each, they were, and we felt dead spoilt, like dogs with our bellies tickled: fantastic. But also another example of Rob’s – what would you say? – ‘unique’ managerial style, because he’d never just give you the money to go and get a shirt for yourself; oh no, he’d have to buy it for you. Me, Barney and Steve: fine about that. We all lived with our parents; we were used to being mothered (it turned out Steve’s mum bought all his clothes anyway) and were over the moon with our new shirts. Ian: not so fine. Whether it was Debbie bending his ear or what, I don’t know, but he always took exception to things like that.

  Later on, in New Order, Rob would behave the same, except the stakes were higher then, so it would be, ‘Look, here’s two grand, give yourself a holiday.’ Or, ‘Here’s money for a car.’ But it all started off with that blue shirt that I’m wearing to play ‘Shadowplay’ on Granada Reports.

  The other thing about that performance is that I had blond hair. The reason for that is that after we’d changed our name to Joy Division we thought we needed a gimmick; and, during a group meeting in a pub in Piccadilly, it was decided that we were all going to bleach our hair. The next day I bought a hair kit called ‘Born Blonde’. It cost £1.25, dead expensive. Got home, put the plastic cap on, bleached my hair, got a clip round the ear from my mum for it. She hated it – hated anything like that, God rest her soul. She kicked the shit out of me when I got my first tattoo, then didn’t speak to me for three weeks. I was thirty-two!

  Anyway, I’d dyed my hair, and next time I went to rehearsal was dead excited about seeing everyone else with their blond hair. Except when I got there it turned out that I was the only one who’d done it – and them lot were laughing their arses off at me.

  Those fuckers.

  I went, ‘I thought we were all bleaching our hair blond!’ And they just laughed. They’d stitched me up, the bastards.

  Apart from that, it was a good performance, and I remember enjoying the day, being overwhelmed to be in Granada studios. Me, the big Corrie fan. Then recording it, and being really pleased with how it came out, because it was a good showcase for what we were about, really. I mean, you see Ian’s dancing. Not nearly as full-on as it was when we played live but it’s there; Bernard with his guitar high, picking out those dead-brittle guitar lines; Steve, like a machine; me with my bass starting to get low.

  The low bass was an idea I got when I saw the Clash at Belle Vue and was fixated by Paul Simonon, who looked the dog’s bollocks – one of the coolest men ever. Staring, I thought, How come he looks so good compared to other bass players? Then I realized it was the strap. He was playing the bass dead low. There and then I decided it was a long strap for me from then on.

  Ah, but what I discovered when I got home was that that my playing style is nothing like Paul Simonon’s, which is easy to play with a long strap. My kind of bass? Really hard to play with a long strap.

  Didn’t stop me, though. Fuck it: I dropped my strap by about six inches and – typical of me, always taking everything to obsessive levels – carried on dropping it until I was physically bent double. All of which meant that I ended up playing the bass high, which is my sound, but with the lowest strap, because what happens is that the lower you play, the more you have to bend your hand over, to play the notes, and that’s the hard bit, that bend. Which is also why I make so many bum notes. I’m renowned for them.

  Sound-wise I was most influenced by Jean-Jacques Burnel of the Stranglers. I used to listen to his bass on ‘Peaches’ and ‘5 Minutes’ and think, That’s how I want to sound. When I went to see them at the Bingley Hall in Stafford I wrote down his equipment, a Vox 2x15 cab and a Hi-Watt head, then went out and bought the lot, and it was magnificent, sounded wonderful. So, I got my sound from Jean-Jacques and my strap from Paul Simonon. I’m so pleased I never got into Level 42.

  It was around about that time that we played a gig where one person turned up. The Coach House in Huddersfield on 28 September 1978. We’d borrowed the PA that night, either from the Inadequates or Emergency – one of the two, or both – and lugged it all the way up these really steep, winding stairs, only to get one person in the audience. A bloke who stood there for half the gig then left. I mentioned it in a newspaper interview and all the fans online were going, ‘What’s Hooky talking about? What gig in Huddersfield?’ It wasn’t well advertised, which was the reason it had slipped through the net. Then not long after that piece was in the paper a guy came up to me somewhere and said, ‘Hello. Do you remember me?’

  ‘No, sorry,’ I said.

  He said, ‘I’m the guy who came to see you in Huddersfield. It’s me.’

  ‘No way!’ said I.

  Joy Division’s relationship with Roger Eagle of Eric’s in Liverpool was partly responsible for Eagle suggesting to Tony Wilson that they join forces and release a compilation album. Names suggested for the Manchester-Liverpool union included Joy Division, the Durutti Column and Pink Military, but the project faltered at the negotiating stage when Eagle preferred a conventional twelve-inch format while Wilson, having dropped acid, had conjured an image of a double-seven-inch pack. He had the money: a £5,000 inheritance from his mother, who had died in 1975; the idea was greeted favourably by Saville, Erasmus and Hannett; and so the A Factory Sample EP was conceived, with the release to feature contributions from Joy Division, the Durutti Column, John Dowie and Cabaret Voltaire. Graduating from club night, Factory became Manchester’s fourth independent label after Rabid, New Hormones and Object (the label started by Steve Solamar, the Electric Circus DJ) and at the vanguard of independent labels in the UK.

  We weren’t signed and didn’t have a publishing deal, so when Rob told us that Tony Wilson wanted to meet us, and maybe put one of our songs on his EP, we were like, ‘Wow, yeah, sounds great.’

  Well, when I say that, what I mean is that me, Barney and Steve sat there scratching our heads while Rob and Ian discussed it – and how it was an EP of bands that Tony Wilson, Mister Granada, liked, the bands he’d picked up on and was championing, so it was also an establishment of loyalty between us and Factory as much as anything else.

  Money never came into it, of course. That was one thing we never really talked about in the early days. ‘How much are we getting for doing it?’ ‘What’s the deal on the record?’ ‘What’s the split, man?’ There was none of that, which was wonderful because it was just about going forward, working with people you liked and trusting that the rewards would come. Now, having had more experience, I know that we should have done a deal. Or certainly Tony should have done a deal. The songs on the Factory sampler belonged to us, even though he’d paid for them to be recorded. No way would that happen now, and it happened then only because both parties were young and naïve and a bit too idealistic. I mean, looking back, we had ‘Digital’ on the sampler, one of our best early songs and a possible hit in its own right. Yet we put it on the Factory sample, limited to 5,000 copies. We were giving away the chance to have a hit single: not the cleverest move in the world, surely.

  But we were all in the same boat and Tony was as naïve and idealistic as we were. We first met him in a pub, the Sawyer’s Arms again, I think it was, and were bowled over by his enthusiasm. For whatever reason we hadn’t had a lot to do with him when we did the Granada Reports recording, so this was our first opportunity to get the measure of him. We felt like we were in exalted company. He dressed much older than we did. He was still wearing all that tail-end-of-glam gear: velvet jackets, big collars, big kipper ties. He always wore a suit because of his job, whereas we were all punk, but I liked him straight away. He made us feel very welcome and comfortable. He wasn’t at all intimidat
ing or threatening; even though intellectually he could run rings around us all day he never made us feel like that. He wasn’t one of those people you got to know well – he was never a close mate – but he was a colleague and he certainly had an aura and presence, and we were in awe of him right from the word go. I mean, he was on TV and you can’t overestimate that. I was watching him every night at six o’clock so to suddenly be sat next to him was wild. It felt like an amazing aspect to what we were doing, that we got to meet people like Tony Wilson. The Tony Wilson. Who liked our band, liked what we were doing, wanted to make a record and put us on it.

  He and Ian hit it off most, of course, probably because Ian was more on his intellectual level as well as being a lot more worldly about music. The thing about Ian was that he was into the bands we all grew to love; he was into them first. Not only that but he could also talk in depth about them in a way that appealed to Tony. You could tell that he was pleased to have this equally knowledgeable guy around, and you could tell that Tony felt the same way. I doubt there were many people who worked at Granada who knew about Throbbing Gristle.

  So that was it: it was decided that we’d do the EP with Tony; go into Cargo Studios in Rochdale and record it with Martin Hannett.

  Which brings me to Martin. I think we’d heard of Cargo Studios – it was the most famous punk studio in the North. I think the Gang of Four had done their record there, which was a great record, and John Brierley was renowned as an excellent engineer/producer. [This was the ‘Damaged Goods’/’Love Like Anthrax’/’Armalite Rifle’ single, recorded at Cargo for Fast Product with John Brierley as the engineer.]

  I’ve also since found out that John was a proposed original member of Factory. So when it first started out it was Tony, Alan Erasmus, Peter Saville, Martin Hannett and John Brierley, with John putting the studio into the partnership. The idea was that Martin was going to produce the bands, Saville would do the sleeves, Tony would be the talking head and Alan Erasmus would be the enforcer. Saying that, I don’t think that from that day to this anyone has ever figured out exactly what Alan Erasmus did in Factory – he was just incredibly important in some way no one can seem to figure out. He always was, and remains, a complete mystery, a true enigma. The funny thing about Alan is that he always moans about his lack of presence in the Factory legacy but just you try coaxing him out of the woodwork to get involved. He was moaning to me about the Grant Gee Joy Division documentary, saying, ‘How come I’m not in it? Cheeky bastards never asked me.’

  So I said to him, ‘Look, I’m making a Factory documentary; why don’t you come and meet me and you can be on it?’ He said yes and came down. I stuck the microphone in his face and asked the first question. All of a sudden he spluttered, turned puce, then remembered a prior engagement and ran away. Literally ran away. So he’s his own worst enemy without a shadow of a doubt. Big heart, though.

  Anyway. Back to John Brierley. John sussed out pretty quick that the Factory lot were a bunch of amateur, disorganized lunatics, so he bailed. Pretty smart move. He just said, ‘Pay me as usual for the studio,’ and went to being the engineer for the Factory sampler, with Martin as the producer. We went in with our two songs, which were ‘Digital’ and ‘Glass’, which I think were the two newest songs that we liked the best – as I said, it’s always your most recent material that you rate the most highly. So in we went and met Martin Hannett for the first time. I’d seen him before; I saw him play bass in Greasy Bear once, in a clothes shop in Manchester. But this was the first proper meeting.

  Prior to opening Cargo, John Brierley had worked at Granada. He’d built his own mobile recording truck in an ex-ambulance that had been used for recording bands on Tony Wilson’s So It Goes, and at the end of 1977 left Granada to open Cargo on Kenion Street in Rochdale, running it from 1978 until 1984. Gang of Four’s arrival in 1977 paved the way for the post-punk bands who liked it for its ‘live’ sound, while its most famous client was Martin Hannett, who recorded, among others, Joy Division, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Durutti Column, Crispy Ambulance, A Certain Ratio and Section 25 there. Hannett liked the sound of Cargo, while the reasonable rates of hire gave him the freedom to experiment.

  ‘Whenever he was in for a session he would bring all this extra gear in,’ writes Brierley on cargostudios.co.uk, ‘his AMS Digital Delays, AMS Digital Reverbs, several synths and that along with all my Rebis delays and noise gates, Compressors, MXR delays, MXR harmonizers and echo plates, Roland chorus units, various analogue delays and effects [meant] he had a phenomenal amount of choices. Because he had so many choices it was inevitable that he would come up with some interesting effects, and many of his good sounds came about by accident. I was always impressed by his use of very fast delay on the snare drum, it did sound good and very punchy. His mixes were a combination of very obvious effects and a lot of very subtle effects, just a hint of delay here or a touch of reverb there. The result was often stunning.’

  Hannett, meanwhile, was counting his blessings. He loved the ‘space’ in Joy Division’s sound and was especially impressed with Steve Morris’s drumming – not to mention the fact that the band never argued with him. ‘They were a gift to a producer,’ he said, ‘because they didn’t have a clue.’

  Cargo was great. It was a converted warehouse that from the outside looked like a factory unit but inside was stuffed with gear. It had dry-stone and brick walls and thick hanging drapes everywhere, and we arrived to find Martin already ensconced in a vast black leather chair behind the desk, John Brierley running around and virtually no room for anyone else.

  I think we all thought Martin was a bit bonkers, because he was a weird, larger-than-life character, no doubt about it, even at that stage before the drugs got hold of him. Thinking back my first impression of him was his big curly hair and the trampy, hippy look he had going on. That and the non-stop smoking – dope and cigarettes – so that the atmosphere in the control room was like that of a wizard surrounded by smoke and in charge of his strange machines – a lunatic wizard who never used one word when he could use twenty-one, nineteen of which you couldn’t understand.

  John Brierley, on the other hand, was the opposite: a straightforward, very business-like, quite formal bloke. Bit brusque, you might almost say, but I got on well with him.

  We didn’t realize it then, of course, being so green, but Martin and John, they were two of the best, certainly in the region, probably in the country, and Cargo, despite its size, was a great studio. For a start we were recording on a sixteen-track, which was for us – when you bear in mind that our demos were done on a four-track and the An Ideal for Living EP on an eight-track – a big step up. Cargo had a Cadey sixteen-track machine using two-inch tape. It was a valve recorder, making it really warm- and fat-sounding and frankly the best recording medium that you can ever use. Sounds immense. We were delighted about that. All of which made it an easy session. Tony and Alan were floating about that day, so the Factory lot were very much in attendance, and the atmosphere was good. The whole thing, in fact, was very, very straightforward, none of the fooling about with Martin that would come later. He put some sound effects on. You can hear them in ‘Digital’ and ‘Glass’, which both sound amazing – easily our best recording up to that point – but I don’t remember him doing it while we were there. My main feeling was just, yes, because my parts sounded good. It’s only when your work starts disappearing that you get fed up. So if you listen back you’ll hear a happy me, because the bass on ‘Digital’ is kicking it. As a musician your ego and self-confidence really grow if your part is getting used, whereas they can take a huge blow if your part is downplayed, which is what happened to me on ‘Atmosphere’ later on. On that record Martin mixed the bass down, but when we played it live it was loud in the mix. During the session I was like, ‘No, no, make it louder,’ but Martin just grinned and told me I was outvoted. Now I listen to ‘Atmosphere’ and I think it’s . . . okay. But he must have been going off me because on Closer he mixed the ba
ss right down. The guitar too, actually. Both Barney and I fell out with him on Closer.

  Anyway, all that was still to come. During this particular session I was feeling pretty good about my contribution, but other than that I just kept myself to myself. You’ve got to remember that we were in the presence of some pretty big characters: Rob, Tony, Alan, Martin, so us lot just sat in the corner quaking.

  After the session we did the sleeves. It was a double-seven-inch and we got paid to put them together. I think we went to Alan’s flat at Palatine Road. I seem to remember that it was in was the scruffy hippy kitchen that we did it. Tony didn’t have to pay us really, but me, Ian and Barney got 50p for every 100 that we folded and put in the sleeves, 5,000 altogether. Not for the last time, either. Later on, Factory released the Durutti Column’s debut, The Return of the Durutti Column, which came in a sandpaper sleeve, and I got paid for sticking bits of sandpaper on to 2,000 Durutti Column albums.

  Inspired partly by Far Eastern record packaging and partly by the arty designs of Fast Product releases, Tony Wilson suggested a heat-sealed gatefold format for the A Factory Sample package. Peter Saville’s design echoed his poster for FAC 1, and the EP included a set of stickers, one to represent each band, with Joy Division being a sailor’s marionette. Its intricacies, however, made it more difficult to assemble than anticipated and a Christmas Eve release had to be postponed. Tony had scheduled A Factory Sample for release in December 1978 but Peter Saville missed the deadline for completing the artwork, pushing the release date back to January 1979. Wilson, however, was determined to give copies of the EP as Christmas presents to all the musicians who had played on it. So on Christmas Eve he photocopied Peter Saville’s design and made his own sleeves with careful use of paper and glue, putting in the already pressed discs and delivering them himself, like a punk Santa Claus, to the homes of the twenty musicians, including Ian Curtis, Stephen Morris, Bernard Albrecht and Peter Hook. A Factory Sample eventually appeared in two batches in January and February.