Mad World

by Lori Majewski

  The only problem with Joy Division was Ian’s illness. If Ian hadn’t been ill, he’d probably still be here today. The degenerative effects of the drugs he was taking for the illness heightened his depression and made him unable to cope with all of the other things in his life, I think.

  But the thing is, I was dealing with Ian on a day-to-day basis, and even though he wasn’t well, he looked like he was coping. I know it doesn’t seem like that now, and that’s one thing I realized when I’d written [the memoir Unknown Pleasures]: It really was plainly obvious that he wasn’t coping. But the problem was that whenever you asked him, he always told you he was okay, and in your heart, that’s what you wanted. You wanted this guy, whom you loved and cherished and revered, to tell you everything was okay. You’d ask him, and he’d say, “Yes, Hooky, everything is fine. Don’t worry. Let’s carry on.” And you’d go, “Phew. Thank God for that.” I’ve seen friends of mine who’ve been ill succumb to it and just go into a pit, and it’s very, very difficult. But with Ian, it was never like that. He fought it so well, and his whole reason for living seemed to be to make sure you heard what you wanted to hear.

  Most of the time that you spent with Ian, though, was relaxed, and we used to have a lot of laughs. It was just us in the back of a van, playing great music. And just when you’re getting to the point when it could have been poisoned [by success], it stopped. There weren’t wild parties; there weren’t drugs, particularly; there were no girls. I wasn’t drinking that much, because we had no money—we couldn’t afford it!

  [After Ian died], we couldn’t replace him. That would have been absolutely 100 percent impossible. There was no chance, and we all knew that. We knew that immediately. It’s not like when INXS got that guy [J.D. Fortune] in. We could have gotten someone who sounded like Ian, but it wouldn’t have been the same.

  MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs from the Cold, Dark, Rain-Soaked Streets of Manchester 1. “Hand in Glove,” The Smiths 2. “Homosapien,” Pete Shelley 3. “Time Goes by So Slow,” The Distractions 4. “A Song from Under the Floorboards,” Magazine 5. “Beasley Street,” John Cooper Clarke

  SUMNER: We were New Order for 10 years before we played any Joy Division songs [in concert]. We didn’t want people to say, “Oh, they’ve only made it because of Ian’s death—that’s propelled them along, and they’re living off their heritage.” We wanted to make it on our terms, so we spent 10 years doing that. Then one night, I think it might have been Irvine Meadows in California, it was Ian’s birthday—not the anniversary of his death, which I don’t think is something to celebrate—and we decided to play “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and another Joy Division song. People were like, “Are these new songs?” They didn’t get much of a response. When we play them now, people go wild.

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS IS NOW

  “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was a posthumous U.K. hit. The surviving members of Joy Division went on to form New Order (see this page). Aside from their not-insignificant contribution to Manchester’s musical heritage, the band poured a ton of money into the city’s legendary nightspot, the Haçienda. While the club was the epicenter of the city’s vibrant rave culture, its financial mismanagement drove the band to the brink of bankruptcy. Tony Wilson’s easy-come, easy-go approach to the finances of Factory Records drove them the rest of the way there. Joy Division’s story, as well as the rise and fall of Factory and the Haçienda, were wittily chronicled in Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film, 24 Hour Party People. Curtis’s biography was handled in more somber fashion in Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film, Control. Peter Hook published a memoir of his Joy Division years, Unknown Pleasures, in 2012.

  HOOK: Paul Young’s was the most famous [cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”], and at the time, I hated it.* But then, we made more money off of that rendition than we ever did as Joy Division. It’s quite painful, isn’t it? It was smoochy, and it was everything we didn’t want to be—cabaret.

  SUMNER: New Order was a more commercial success than Joy Division, but Joy Division just keeps selling and selling. It’s kind of a self-propelling brand. I hate to use the word “brand,” because Joy Division was not a commercial product, but it’s kind of a self-regenerating brand. A friend brought his daughter around to my house; she was like 13 or 14, and she had an iPod. I said, “Oh, what are you listening to?”—expecting her to say “Justin Bieber” or something. No: “It’s this band called Joy Division.” I didn’t tell her I was in Joy Division, but her father told her, and next time she came around, she was like, “Can I have your autograph?”

  HOOK: Joy Division were an absolutely unique group. We stayed independent, on an independent record label; we didn’t go to London like everybody else—we stayed in the place that made us and stayed true to it. We actually entertained a whole fucking city at our own expense for 16 years. I think that is changing the world of musical and world culture.

  We wrote fucking great music. The chemistry between the individuals [in the band] was absolutely fantastic, and the individual playing styles of each one of us has been much emulated. Some groups will be like, “I really like Stephen Morris’s rhythms,” or “I really like Bernard’s melody lines and his lead guitar style,” or “I really like Peter Hook’s melodic bass playing.” That actually is very unusual in a group, and everybody tries to emulate that. I hear U2 rip off Joy Division even now. If you look at bands like White Lies or the Editors, some of them take the fixation a little too far. I don’t think they capture the naturalness, the relaxed fitting-together that Joy Division had. They have a very manufactured sound; it doesn’t sound very natural. One of the most natural-sounding bands I’ve heard that sound like Joy Division is the Chameleons.

  When you’re writing music, it’s like you have nothing but this blank canvas. You use the influence and the inspiration to create something. That’s what people do with Joy Division. They love the songs. They love the story of the band. The tragic ending is very rock ’n’ roll, very alluring, very romantic—that “live fast, die young” story. It’s like the perfect ending to your life to go out in a blaze of glory, blowing up on stage at Glastonbury in front of 125,000 people. Rock ’n’ roll, man!

  * PAUL YOUNG: Somebody said, “Why don’t we find a new song and throw it back into the soul idiom?” Which ended up being “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” We asked ourselves: How would Levi Stubbs sing “Love Will Tear Us Apart”? Normally people are like, “You can’t do that.” But there’s me on the first album saying, “I’m going to do a punk song and imagine the Four Tops doing it.”

  “HOW SOON IS NOW?”

  ou could say that Morrissey and Marr were a Mancunian Morrison and Manzarek. Only, instead of demanding the world worship him as a snakeskin-clad shaman, Morrissey sang from the perspective of an invisible outsider, forever ignored and underestimated, and he did it while brandishing a bunch of gladioli and sporting National Health Service specs and a hearing aid. The world worshipped him anyway. The Smiths were the first serious, critically revered, independent act with a giddy, overemotional following forever on the verge of hysteria. The Smiths made big boys cry like little girls, and they made big girls wish the men in their lives were more like Morrissey. He was wittier. He felt more. He suffered more. He understood more. The Smiths may never have reached the same arena-filling heights as the Cure and Depeche Mode, but they earned their place in the Mount Rushmore of modern rock, and it was “How Soon Is Now” that put them there. If the decade has three great doomed love songs—”Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “The Killing Moon” being the other two—”How Soon Is Now?” is the most isolated, the most hopeless, the most alone. But while Morrissey sounds resigned to his loveless destiny, Johnny Marr’s music has never been this big, rich, and deep. “Epic” is an overused word—especially in this book—but “How Soon Is Now?” is an epic of adolescent angst: It takes a handful of hurt feelings and makes them into a masterpiece.

  LM: The Smiths didn’t have a lot of the things I looked for in a band: e
scapist music videos, male members with makeup, at least one keyboard player. And their name was the most ordinary moniker a group could possibly have. But the Smiths were like no one I’d heard before—or since. Almost immediately upon hearing “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” they launched straight into my top-five favorite bands and never left. I didn’t have to apologize for liking them. And being a Smiths fan reflected well on your movie taste and your literary quotient. Yes, Morrissey was divisive (some might say whiny), but no one ever captured loneliness, insecurity, and fumbling immature awkwardness like he did. No one ever sang my life like he did. I had no idea what a vegetarian even was before I heard “Meat Is Murder”—Morrissey’s done more for animal rights in the past 30 years than anyone on the planet! And you know what the best thing he ever did was? Not get back together with the Smiths. Court cases and ill feelings notwithstanding, I’m happy I don’t have to see them tainting that immortal legacy. Because no financially motivated reunion of the four now-50-something Smiths could ever equal the show in my head.

  JB: Not a fan.

  JOHNNY MARR: I think “How Soon Is Now?” is unusual because it sounds really, really good in a club when you’re fucked up—and that’s okay. “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” is a really loved song also, and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” has a different kind of love for it. But “How Soon Is Now?” sounds really good in American clubs, and it was made late at night with a kind of swampy, sexy vibe going on. I don’t think I’ve ever said “vibe” and “sexy” in the same sentence—the song must have something good going for it if it makes me use those words!

  It was written over a three-day period. On the Friday, I sat down around noonish with my little Portastudio and wrote “William, It Was Really Nothing” and recorded it on a little four-track for the A-side of the next single. Because that was such a fast, short, upbeat song, I wanted the B-side to be different, so I wrote “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” on Saturday in a different time signature—in a waltz time as a contrast. I was kind of happied out after writing “William.”

  On Sunday night I kicked back and treated myself to writing something completely different from both those songs. I had a short, upbeat one and a short, sad one, so I decided to write a long, swampy one with a groove. I always wrote songs in batches of three and usually still do.

  MORRISSEY: The song was recorded in North London, in the old Decca studios. It established a certain turning point for the band, even though we were still oddly associated with timidity. I think the lyrics embarrassed the other Smiths, and the producer [John Porter] said nothing, and greater emphasis was placed on the guitars. I’d reached the point where I had to register whatever it was I felt, and Angie Marr [Johnny’s wife] was the first person who complimented me on the lyric.

  ANDY ROURKE: I’ve never been embarrassed by his lyrics. They were truthful and down to the bone. I was embarrassed to show my dad the first Smiths 45, “Hand In Glove,” because it had a guy’s naked butt on the cover.

  MARR: I was really excited when I first heard the lyrics to “How Soon Is Now?” But I always was really excited when I first heard the lyrics of all the songs. I expected that the lyrics would be fantastic for every song that we wrote, and they always were.

  ROURKE: Usually we would do a very basic run-through in the recording studio, then Morrissey would take a cassette tape and go off to his room or house or wherever and work on [the lyrics] for a day or two. We’d finish the songs, and then he would come in and do his thing over the top. We didn’t know what the hell Morrissey was going to sing. It was always a great moment, waiting to see what he would come up with.

  MARR: We made the record until dawn. I got a taxi home from Finsbury Park in London to Queensgate and got into bed around 8 or 9 a.m. Then I woke up, and it was dark the next evening, and I realized that we had done something that was really different. I remember thinking, Did that really happen? We just caught it in a sort of 24-hour kind of time capsule when we recorded it. The demo was what it was, but things happened in the recording session that really took it up several degrees. It was a real team effort.

  MORRISSEY: When the final mix was finished, I took a tape of the song by taxi to Rough Trade Records, played it to Geoff Travis [the head of the label], and when it finished, he said, “What is Johnny doing? That’s just noise!,” and the song became a B-side [to “William, It Really Was Nothing”]. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Sire released it as a single, but couldn’t get it on the Top 100 even though it had great radio play [on modern rock stations] and we were selling out large arenas. Also, Sire couldn’t secure the Smiths a television spot anywhere! We were paralyzed by the dumbness of the times. So we did our best to change them.

  STYLE COUNCIL

  “Morrissey used to buy his—I was going to say ‘shirts,’ but they were actually blouses,” Rourke remembers. “He used to buy them from a women’s clothing place called Evans Outsizes that was for fat women in Manchester. These women’s blouses that nobody wanted became Morrissey’s trademark. He used to like tearing them up and throwing them into the crowd.”

  MARR: We formed the group as a positive thing to represent our generation who weren’t mainstream. A lot is made of the difference between us and bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet and Culture Club. It’s right to point out those differences between those mainstream groups and groups like the Smiths and New Order, who were just a different kind of people full-stop. We were independent groups from the start—the others were very much major-label groups. Pretty much everyone you see on the Band Aid record, almost all of those people, with the exception of Paul Weller, represented straight, mainstream aspirations. Those bands just aspired to be big, big pop stars. Without having to discuss it, we knew we were all alternatives, and we didn’t even consider that we were all on the same page. When I say “we,” I’m talking about not just the four individual members of the Smiths; I’m talking about people like Bernard Sumner and Billy Bragg too. You were either on the side of the Cure and Depeche and the Smiths, or you were on the side of the more mainstream acts.

  It just so happened that some of the alternative acts got very popular. Depeche Mode got to be a very, very big, well-known group playing stadiums in America. That’s the great thing about pop music: Guys with interesting ideas who might be more subversive or challenging can get into the mainstream. So if the Pet Shop Boys have huge hits across the world, it’s a great thing. Because it’s people who do have something to say and aren’t just there purely for fame but can wrap up great attitudes and interesting politics—conceptual and social politics and ideas—in a mainstream, four-minute song. That infiltrates Middle America and the homes of people who need to wake up a little bit. We weren’t mainstream people; we didn’t like “jock culture,” sexism, and homophobia. We didn’t like all that nasty stuff, and that’s what we’d like to sing about. And we assumed our audience was made up largely of people like us.

  MIXTAPE: 5 Cover Versions of Smiths Songs 1. “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want,” The Dream Academy 2. “Hand in Glove,” Sandie Shaw 3. “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby,” Kirsty MacColl 4. “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” Act 5. Back to the Old House,” Everything But The Girl

  “We weren’t mainstream people; we didn’t like ‘jock culture,’ sexism, and homophobia.”

  ROURKE: When we appeared on TV, people saw normal people. We didn’t wear fucking chains or six-foot hair and shoulder pads. They saw normal, almost vulnerable people, especially Morrissey. It screamed out to vulnerable people that they had an ally, somebody who speaks their language instead of this bullshit, plastic-fame stuff. The first time we went on Top of the Pops, we were dressed in Marks and Spencer sweaters and black jeans that our manager made for us. We went to the makeup room, and I think John Taylor was next to me, or somebody from Duran Duran who had these thick fucking shoulder pads, chains, and hair 70 feet high. The makeup woman said, “So, what are you gonna be we
aring for the performance?” I was like, “This is it: I’m wearing it.” She was like, “Huh?” She thought I was crazy. A lot of it was down to the fact that we were from Manchester. Someone would punch you in the face—or kick you in the face—if you dressed like that. Our shared Irish heritage also played a part. We were all good Catholic boys, altar boys. Although, I don’t think Morrissey was an altar boy. I can’t imagine Morrissey in a dress. In a tutu, maybe….

  I met Johnny when I was 11. When we first started playing music together, we were listening to the Bothy Band and Fairport Convention—really traditional folk music. I don’t know how we ended up sounding like we sounded with the Smiths. We were listening to Richard Thompson, early Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, James Williamson. Johnny loved Rory Gallagher. Speaking for myself, I got really into black funk music—a lot of the Smiths bass lines are very funky. Chic was definitely an influence.

  I met Mike [Joyce, drummer] and Morrissey when we did a demo for “Handsome Devil” and “Miserable Lie.” Mike was this punk drummer who was kind of brash. Johnny was the studious one who always came up with a plan. Morrissey was different, put it that way. He’s a very shy and reserved person, but charming at the same time. Luckily, he became a different person when he went on the stage—he had this alter ego. After “How Soon Is Now?,” he took it to a different level and gained a lot of confidence and started going crazy onstage and doing all this crazy dancing and rolling around on the floor.

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS IS NOW