Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook

  Anyway, we finished the album in April and, despite me and Barney protesting that we wanted to sound like the Sex Pistols, the master went off to the pressing plant and they pressed 10,000 of them.

  One night Rob phoned me up and said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to go and pick the record up.’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I said, ‘Ten thousand of them. Isn’t anybody else coming?’

  ‘No, just me and you.’

  I hired a van from Salford Van Hire and had to tell them I was moving house (they had a sign on the wall refusing to hire to ‘musicians, hawkers and gypsies’). Then we drove down to London to pick up the records from the plant. Loading the van took an age then we drove them back up to Manchester, thinking the axle was going to snap any second, taking it slow so we didn’t fuck up the van. At Manchester we went straight to Palatine Road and started handballing them up the three flights of stairs to Alan’s flat. Margox was there. That’s Margi Clarke, the actress out of Letter To Brezhnev and Corrie, of course, but back then she was called Margox and she did bits of singing and TV presenting and she was there at 86a with Alan’s flatmate.

  This was about 7pm and she said, ‘Oh, what you got there, love? Is this your record, like? Can I have one?’ We ignored her and they disappeared off into the bedroom. Sure enough, as we loaded the records in we did it to a background noise of them having very noisy orgasms, thinking, Fucking hell, could this be any fucking worse?

  She came floating out much later, when me and Rob were sitting there dripping in sweat from having carried 10,000 copies of Unknown Pleasures up the stairs.

  ‘Can I have a record?’ she said.

  Seems a bit mean now, but it was just the culmination of a bad day; I’m ashamed to say that Rob told her to fuck right off again.

  Quite funny, really, because at our very next gig, at Eric’s in May, who should be there as our support? Only Margox again. She did this act where she sang over other people’s records – Kraftwerk, Sex Pistols and stuff – just shrieking over the top of them. Absolutely awful, it was, and I’m sure she’d be the first to agree. Still, we loved her. How can you not love Margi Clarke? That really earthy, rude character you see on screen is like a toned-down version of the real one. What you see is what you get there, let me tell you. She is wonderful. So when we were in the dressing room before the show, and Twinny winked at us before saying to her, ‘Show us your tits, love,’ I don’t know why we were surprised when she went, ‘Here y’go, la,’ lifted up her top and showed us them in all their glory.

  We went bright red and stayed bright red when she didn’t put them away. Just waited until we were at maximum discomfort, our faces burning so hot you could fry eggs on them and silently plotting revenge on Twinny and his big mouth, until at last she put us out of our misery, saying, ‘That taught you a lesson, lads?’

  ‘Yes,’ we mumbled like naughty school boys.

  Top down, she left the room pissing herself laughing. She’d played us at our own game and won hands down. She was wild – a great girl – and I was chuffed when she started on Coronation Street years later. Like I say, it’s one of those programmes that I always feel is inextricably linked with my life, right from listening to the theme tune at the top of the stairs with our Chris, to Margi Clarke, and then to Tony Wilson telling us how he’d started its most famous siren, Pat Phoenix, on drugs. He’d got her into dope, or so he said, and once she was into it she wouldn’t leave him alone. She became a proper spliff-head.

  ‘Where’s that Tony Wilson with my drugs?’ she used to scream in the office. ‘Come on, where is he? Tony! Where’s my fucking drugs?’ Tony would be hiding under the desk to try to get away from her. He’d created a monster. It’s funny because I remember, just before I started the group, being in Kendal’s department store in town and I looked up and she was there, Elsie Tanner, and I went, ‘Oh, Hiya,’ and she glared at me like looks could kill and went, ‘Oh, fuck off, will you?’ and stormed past. My first brush with celebrity.

  One of Manchester’s most famous sirens telling me to fuck right off. Two years later Margi Clarke telling me to fuck off too – the Peter Hook curse of Coronation Street.

  ‘Not that I’d change anything’

  Unknown Pleasures was released to great critical acclaim, with the NME hailing at as an ‘English rock masterwork’ and Melody Maker as one of the year’s best debuts. Though initial sales failed to match the acclaim, word began to spread and Factory soon sold around 15,000, earning the label between £40,000 and £50,000 profit inside six months.

  Our next job was a session for Piccadilly Radio, where we recorded our first version of ‘Atmosphere’, called ‘Chance’ at that point, along with ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, which went on to become the opening track on the next album, Closer, except in a Hannett slowed-down stripped-down, effect-heavy version.

  To be honest, I always preferred it sounding like the version we did first – or better still when we did it live. ‘Chance’, on the other hand, improved a lot when we re-recorded it. The version we recorded during the session had an organ on it, an old one that Barney had borrowed from his gran. She’d bought it from Woolworths in the 1950s and it was made of old, hard plastic that had gone brittle by the time we got our hands on it. Had a wild sound, though. We liked it straight away, thought it sounded immense and would be great on ‘Chance’. Pleased with the way it sounded, we decided to play the song at our next gig, at the F Club in Leeds with the Durutti Column, and took the organ along. There was no case for it but we stowed it on top of the gear, until Vini came along, put his guitar on top of the stack and knocked the Woolies organ off. All that brittle plastic just shattered when it hit the floor. Gutted. We loved that organ.

  Ah well, onward and upward. Unknown Pleasures came out in June and got fantastic reviews. The distribution wasn’t great, of course – that’s what you get for being independent – but our stock was rising; we were in demand. We became like a touring machine.

  Me, Bernard and Steve found it exhausting juggling the late nights with work, and we weren’t married. For us, home was a sanctuary. For Ian, once he got out of Steve’s Cortina at night, he was stepping straight into another world of problems: a wife who was uncertain about how she fitted into her husband’s new life, and who felt excluded from it, a victim of Rob’s no-girlfriends policy. An unhappy wife, in other words. And, of cour se, a new baby . . .

  Natalie had been born while we were recording Unknown Pleasures, and the fact that I can remember so little about it says less for my memory and more for the fact that Ian hardly mentioned it. There was no big announcement. No session down the pub to wet the baby’s head. I don’t think he would have said anything at all apart from the fact that he’d fainted at the sight of Debbie giving birth, falling, splitting his head open and leaving Debbie to give birth alone while the nurses looked after him. We asked him more about the cut. In Touching from a Distance Debbie says that Ian had had a fit and cut his head, so what the truth of the matter is I’m not completely sure. All I know is that’s how we found out Ian had become a dad.

  Why didn’t he announce it? I don’t know. A mixture of things, I suppose. A desire to keep band and family separate, which was always Rob’s philosophy, and a sign of the times, when men didn’t go dotty about their kids like we do now. All wrong, of course, and it must have made things more difficult for him having to keep wife, kid, and the group all happy. Trying to follow his dreams at the same time. With the benefit of hindsight you can see how damaging it would have been and I’m pleased to say that I’ve learned from it: since New Order’s split in 1993 I’ve always gone out of my way to make sure that family and friends of all the band members aren’t excluded but very much included.

  Great thing, isn’t it, hindsight?

  In July we went to Central Sound Studios in Manchester for the first of the ‘Transmission’ sessions. The tunes were pouring out thick and fast. ‘Atmosphere’, ‘Dead Souls’ and ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ all came during this period. I thin
k if it hadn’t been for the great reception at the Mayflower we wouldn’t have bothered with ‘Transmission’ as a single, to be honest. But the Mayflower had been the first of a series of occasions where ‘Transmission’ had blown people away live. We’d begun to think maybe we had something a bit special on our hands – so special we should leave it off the album and release it as a single.

  It’s one of our songs that should have been a hit – and probably would have been if we’d been on a major, or even if Factory had done things differently. If we’d done things the way normal groups do them, in other words, and released ‘Digital’ as a single, which would have been big. Then ‘Disorder’ should have been a single and that would have been bigger. By then we’d have had the kind of foundations we needed to make ‘Transmission’ a monster, and by the time we got to ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ we’d have been ready to take over the world.

  But we didn’t do it the normal way, of course. We did it the Factory way.

  Not that I’d change anything, mind you. I’d stop Ian hanging himself, obviously. But otherwise I really wouldn’t change anything. I wouldn’t change the fact that we downplayed the singles or that we left singles off the albums that we didn’t promote. Because in many ways it’s made us who we are. Besides, the way we did it seemed better than doing what a lot of bands had done. Siouxsie & the Banshees, for instance, had signed to a major and had to sell something like fifty times as many albums to make the same money we did, plus had less freedom and control and had to play the game, the awful game, which is all about selling albums. For us, the punk ethic that had brought us into it moulded the whole way we behaved, and we had a manager who fervently believed in the same ideals, who let us grow and develop at our own pace, without A&R men breathing down our necks, without having to do loads of press we didn’t want to do. We would have had to if we’d been on the dreaded major.

  So the first session for the ‘Transmission’ single was at Central Sound Studios, right next to the Odeon in the centre of Manchester and right next to the best kebab shop in town. We got the shock of our lives when we realized where the studio was. We’d been going to that kebab shop for years, never knowing that there was a recording studio next door. What a bonus. The kebab shop, I mean.

  It was a cheaper studio, not like Strawberry, but was good for demoing the songs before we went to record them properly. We did ‘Transmission’, obviously, and it was a good run-through. Plus ‘Novelty’, despite the fact that it was one of our really early, raw ones, one that I’d written, actually, that Ian had been generous enough to take and mould and make into a song. But for whatever reason Rob really liked it, so we just agreed and recorded it. Badgered into it, probably, because comparing it to the others it sounds very young – a young song from a young band learning their craft. ‘Something Must Break’ was left off the single because there was no room and Rob didn’t want to compromise the sound quality of ‘Novelty’ because he loved it so much. It was an interesting song for us, though, being the first time the band had used a synthesizer. Martin had used them, of course, but the thing about us in Joy Division – especially me, Bernard and Steve – was that we were sponges constantly learning off Martin. So you’d have this situation where on Unknown Pleasures me and Barney were moaning about Martin using a synth, then a couple of sessions down the line we were using it ourselves. Bernard would embrace all that more than me, and on ‘Something Must Break’ he used a synthesizer instead of the guitar; there’s no guitar on it. It’s the same technique we used to write ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, actually. There was no guitar on that when we first wrote it, just Bernard playing the synth, me on bass, Steve on drums and Ian’s vocals. Even live when we used to play it there was no guitar on it, which gave it a different, unusual sound. It was still a fantastic song and the melody was a great one. Later, when Ian mastered the guitar a little, he played on both.

  With Unknown Pleasures out and ‘Transmission’ in the can, it really felt like we were taking off: drawing ahead of the competition a bit. That meant we had to do more interviews, of course, which was a downside. But, again, the fact that we were on an independent meant that we could be awkward bastards if we wanted to be. In fact Tony and Rob encouraged us to be – and, believe me, we did want to be awkward bastards. I mean, we’d all been reading the NME and Melody Maker for years but, being the kind of contrary types that we were, rather than embrace the music press we kicked against it. The way we saw it, looking at most band interviews, was that if you took the name of the band off they were all exactly the same. Amazing that the NME and Melody Maker got away with it week after week, because most people said the same thing. Then there was the fact that people kept bringing up the Nazi thing. Once we’d answered that but kept being asked about it, and once it had been made plain that the band didn’t have Nazi sympathies but people still went on about it, well, it was bound to piss us off. So we insulated ourselves against it by being awkward bastards right from the beginning of any interview.

  ‘Tell us about your new album.’

  ‘No.’

  I used to love that. I once did an interview with John Peel’s producer, John Waters. It was for the first Peel session and he said, ‘So, tell us how the session’s going?’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  And he went, ‘Oh right. Would you like to tell us about your plans?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  Afterwards he said it was the most difficult interview he’d ever done, which of course I thought was hilarious. But it wasn’t really a plan. Being bloody-minded just amused me – and when it became part of our persona and one of those things that got us remembered, that suited us fine. We were lucky. We had the luxury of being awkward because we were coming out with great music. We didn’t really care if we pissed off any journalist. The way we looked at them was, Where were you when we were playing to an empty room? It’s one of the eternal frustrations of being in a group. One minute you’re playing to a handful of people yawning their heads off then six months or eight months later you’re playing the exact same material to a packed audience all going bonkers and you think, Where the fuck were you when we played at Oldham Tower Club?

  What was good about our rise was that we were well managed by Rob, who kept our feet on the ground, kept us level-headed and focused on the music; because, even when we had Unknown Pleasures out and the NME was saying it was brilliant, and we had ‘Transmission’ coming out and a buzz around us, gigs coming out of our ears, he kept our feet firmly on the ground. The beauty of Joy Division is that we never made much money while the band existed so there was nothing to sully it – no piles of drugs or cases of booze in the dressing room. We went everywhere in a convoy of knackered van and Steve’s Cortina and stayed with friends – no hotels for us, just the odd B&B. Even when we went to London to record Closer we stayed in a quite scruffy pair of flats with £1.50 per diem: you could spend how you wished, dinner or a couple of pints but not both. We didn’t yet have any money from the record. (Publishing, as in who wrote what in the songs, brings nearly all bands down. I remember the immortal quote from the Mondays: ‘Why is the one playing the maracas getting as much as me who writes the songs?’ Ironically Bez is now as important as all the songwriters, if not more. How the world turns.)

  There was one memorable occasion with Ian putting a drum case on his head and marching round TJ’s, screaming at Rob about money, so maybe we had the odd fall-out, but nothing major. The gigs we were doing weren’t big payers anyway. We just kept on doing our thing, which was playing, recording, winding up journalists, and in late July appearing on Granada TV’s What’s On.

  Now that was excellent and we were very excited to do it – even more so when we went to the subsidized canteen and found it full of Roman soldiers. Rob was following me and Twinny going, ‘Don’t you nick anything. Don’t you fucking nick anything, you pair of bastards.’

  In those days Granada was very unionized. It was a very old-fashione
d union; you had to be a member to work there. It was very powerful. You had to adhere to very strict rules. When we came to set up there was a light that somebody had taken down from the ceiling and put in the middle of the stage, and we said to the sound guys, ‘Do you mind if we move this light, mate?’

  They all shook their heads. ‘Oh, don’t touch that; that’s Lighting. We’re Sound. They’re Camera. That’s Lighting. You can’t touch that.’

  ‘Okay, but we need to move it, mate, to play.’

  ‘You can’t touch it.’

  We were like, ‘You what? What are you talking about? We’ve got to have a sound-check.’

  They were going, ‘No, don’t touch it.’

  They stuck tape around it to mark it out of bounds.

  Our mouths were hanging open. ‘We can’t sound-check.’

  ‘You’ll just have to wait.’

  Rob wasn’t having that. He went to grab at the light and one of the guys started shouting at him, ‘Oh no, don’t touch that. Touch that and we’re going out on strike, the lot of us. That light belongs to the Lighting Union.’

  Rob was in his face. ‘You fucking what, mate?’ but they weren’t budging. Someone called Lighting, who said they’d send someone over, and we all looked at each other in disbelief then sat around to wait, Rob with steam coming out of his ears. Finally, an hour-and-a-half later, this Lighting guy ambled into the studio and picked up the light – ‘Sorry about that; must have left it there when I did Granada Reports’ – and buggered off again.

  Brilliant. We leapt up ready to sound-check – at last – only to watch gobsmacked as the lot of them turned on their heels and marched out. Not on strike, thank fuck for small mercies, but to have dinner. By the time they returned it was to tap their watches and say, ‘Right, you’ve got half an hour to film it. Better get a move on, lads . . .’