Record Play Pause

by Stephen Morris

  We got out and helped Bernard pull the thrashing Ian out as gently as we could. I fetched the sleeping bag.

  I think we all knew by then what was happening.

  ‘Mind his tongue.’

  ‘He’s having a fit! Turn off the hazards, Steve – strobe effect!’

  I was quite surprised that the hazards were working and that I had remembered to turn them on.

  What to do in times of crisis like this? Well, the first thing that sprung to mind was, I need a cigarette as a matter of urgency.

  Rifling through my pockets turned up nothing but empty packets. Bits of cardboard kept for roach material.

  My friend was having a seizure on the hard shoulder of the M1 and all I could think of was nicotine. I was a heartless bastard but maybe it was shock.

  ‘Rob, see if he’s got any cigs. Get his fags.’

  ‘Fuck off. We’ve got to get him to hospital.’

  The fit had subsided slightly but Ian was still only semi-conscious. We laid him on the back seat and I took off in the wrong direction for Luton.

  ‘Slow down, Steve, you’ll fucking get us all killed.’

  How the hell we found Luton and Dunstable Hospital I’ll never know, but probably by stopping a couple of times, winding down the window and asking an unsuspecting nocturnal pedestrian out walking the dog.

  ‘Hospital, mate? Which way?’

  We ushered a still not-entirely-with-us singer into A & E with Rob doing the rundown on the drama of the last forty-five minutes.

  ‘Think he’s had a fit, he’s in a band . . .’ As though being in a band made one prone to this.

  A nurse took Ian away while the three of us waited in the glare of the strip lights.

  ‘Er, did you get his fags, Rob?’

  We were in for a long wait.

  Ian was finally released with a bit of paper and instructions to see his GP first thing in the morning without fail.

  ‘What was it then?’

  ‘He’s had a fit of some kind—’

  ‘Give us a fag, Ian!’

  We resumed our moonlit slog back up north, shocked and subdued.

  That night, everything changed.

  Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but after this Ian’s lyrics, which had previously seemed inclusive – about more than just himself, about people living in some world – became more about departure or confinement. Yes, I am probably reading too much into it, but I’m not alone there. His lyrics were personal to him and we never talked about what they might be about, except in general terms that lyrics could be the script of a film, tell a story. They were important though, very. Ian downplayed that a little.

  * * *

  MH: Sorry to get mixed up but who writes the lyrics? You write the lyrics, you have control over a lot then if you write the lyrics.

  IC: You don’t have control over anything, do you?

  MH: Don’t you? In a way, I mean the lyrics define what the song’s about.

  IC: No I always put the lyrics in after. After the song’s been done, I get a vocal line for it . . .

  RG: Not always, sometimes.

  IC: We have been doing lately, the way we’ve been working lately.

  TW: What do you mean, you get a vocal line?

  IC: Well, the way . . . the melody, a vocal melody and some of the lyrics that I’d have to sing at the time when we did the song. I may keep others, I may not.

  MH: What, you make them up as you sing?

  IC: Yes.

  PH: (referring to an earlier Interview with Sounds’ Dave McCulloch) Flipped when we told him.

  RG: He just couldn’t believe that it all just fell in place. He said well, you must sit down and say we’re going to write a fast poppy type one or a slow . . . didn’t he? And we said, no we just play and it just comes.

  PH: Just rehearse, yes.

  IC: I don’t usually keep the ones that I make . . . What I do is usually I get the vocal melody. There’s usually some of the words that I’ve sung at the time I do keep. I write more to go with it, to fit the mood of the song, fit the mood of the rest of it.

  MH: So you will create the mood of the song?

  IC: Yeah, that’s basically what it is.

  BS: You just feed off it . . . we start with something small and each of us feeds off it till it grows into a song.

  All of this is perfectly true: the music came first, then the words. I can’t imagine a situation where you would get a set of lyrics and then write a tune around them. I’m sure someone must work that way but to me it seems a bit weird.

  We distrusted journalists, felt they had the wrong idea about us. Paul Morley, as someone we’d known a long time, was OK. He had done a proper piece about Joy Division in the NME. The one with Kevin Cummins’s photographs of us in the snow in Hulme. He had mentioned Warsaw in passing previously, but having a write-up in the NME was a big deal. Somehow I expected that seeing us in print would magically make us look like a proper band. It was a bit of a let-down. Compared to the rest of the bands in the NME that week, we just looked odd. We didn’t really look like a band at all. To me, the four of us, Ian, Bernard, Hooky and me, looked just, well, odd. My geography teacher blazer and stripy woolly jumper was about as rock and roll as a mug of Horlicks. Forty years on, the same photographs say something else. Now, we look like a band with something to say.

  When I asked him how he was, Ian said, ‘I’m OK,’ and I willingly believed him.

  In January, the doctor confirmed that Ian had epilepsy and would have to moderate his lifestyle; he would need medication to control the seizures.

  Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Moderation and some tablets? A few early nights, swallow some pills and it’ll all go away.

  I heard what I wanted to hear.

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘Great, let’s have a smoke.’

  The pills began benignly enough but were ineffective. So they tried something stronger but with more potential side effects.

  * * *

  A panacea? There isn’t one.

  It’s really up to you.

  You are now leaving the town of Frying Pan.

  Welcome to Fire (population 1). Please drive carefully.

  Of all the 1970s’ many taboo subjects, mental illness was possibly the most misunderstood. I know that there is a difference between what is termed mental illness and epilepsy, but to most people in the seventies it was one and the same.

  ‘Off his bloody head that one.’

  Best kept in a dark cupboard and ignored by polite society.

  In Macclesfield an ailment of the mind was the domain of the men and women of Parkside – the Funny Farm. I’d been there myself a few times. The most recent hadn’t really been that long before Ian’s first seizure, when I’d got severely depressed and ended up on the antidepressants with very unpleasant and honestly more depressing side effects.

  Those pharmaceutical side effects would be trivial compared to those that Ian experienced. His was heavy-duty medication. A ‘normal’ life would be just about possible. What we were doing was not normal by any stretch of the imagination.

  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – not that it matters, as hindsight holds no virtue – but we should have stopped there and then, or at least paused for breath. Ignored the ‘I’m OKs’ because he was as far from OK as he could get and would get further away from it the more successful Joy Division became.

  That’s not to say we weren’t deeply concerned. Of course we were. We stopped flashing the lights at gigs, but we just didn’t know or understand exactly what his illness meant (or might mean). It could have been a one-off event, might never happen again if you regulated your lifestyle or, on the other hand . . .

  So the New Year got off to a shaky start, but Ian for the most part was soon back to his usual self. Like it or not, the unspoken fact remained that the future of the band now lay with one person’s ability to cope with something we couldn’t comprehend.

  Most of the time, you
view success as something that will make life easier. It will arrive in tiny measures and gradually take some of the pressure off. It’s never that simple.

  As you work your way from aspirational amateurs playing and writing for the fun of it, to the point where someone actually pays you money to do the same, there is a critical point. A fork in the road. Turn back or press on. Your eventual destination is not guaranteed.

  The promise of life in a successful band is one that is free of responsibilities. A Peter Pan-like world that suspends the need to become a grown-up. Be a big kid forever. But to get there involves an investment in responsibility, pressure and strife that may not produce any short-term gain or any gain at all – but so long as everyone’s happy, where’s the harm?

  The degree to which this affects you and those around you will depend on your personal situation and your ability to juggle. It will impact each of you at different times depending on circumstances.

  It was Ian who felt it first.

  House + Wife + Job on the financial certainty side had to be reconciled with potential income from gigs and records in the unpredictable column.

  He and Debbie needed money and what started as a reasonable band meeting on how we could accommodate this slowly boiled over into one of Ian’s petulant but hilarious rants, during the course of which he raged about the rehearsal room wearing a drum case on his head.

  Ian, of course, didn’t find it funny. For him it was very serious indeed. The crux of the argument, as I recall, was to do with the puzzling phenomenon that having being paid a week in hand would now leave him one week out of pocket, if he was paid the Gretton way.

  Rob tried to explain rationally, but once Ian had an idea fixed in his head it could be difficult to dislodge it with reason. You had to bite your lip and ride out the storm.

  It is a situation that all musicians find themselves in at some time or other and needs a leap of faith to overcome. One by one we would have to go through it; we didn’t earn enough from the band. We were all sympathetic to his predicament. It didn’t stop us laughing at him, though.

  ‘You don’t fucking understand!’ he wailed from under his black drum-case helmet. Maybe we didn’t. For a start, we didn’t know Debbie was pregnant. Ian was going to be a father.

  Ian seemed to keep bits of his life compartmentalised. Maybe we all did.

  There was an example of this in October 1978, not long after the Factory Sampler session. My twenty-first birthday was fast approaching and I’d had a bit of cash saved up.

  Never having been twenty-one before, I thought it might be an occasion to celebrate. Gillian and Julie were keen on this idea and suggested maybe we could have an old-fashioned party. Jellies and trifle might be a bit of a laugh. We’d hatched this tipsy juvenile party plan on the way back from the Factory the week before the big day, without giving serious consideration as to where such an event might take place at short notice. It was a nice idea but a little bit impractical. Why not just have a slap-up dinner and a night on the tiles instead?

  The Gilbert sisters still championed the jelly plan; Gillian was in for a more conventional soiree.

  We’d played Leeds with the Cabs on the 24th and I mentioned to Ian that I was thinking of going out that Saturday and did he fancy a night out with Debbie?

  ‘Oh yes, fine, be great.’

  Saturday night rolled around and I gave Ian a call to arrange a time.

  ‘Oh, I’m a bit tired. I’ve been at Barney’s all day.’

  I was a bit surprised by this. Debbie had just passed her driving test and surmised that perhaps it had been a bit of a practice outing for the Curtises’ recently acquired green Morris Traveller. I was no longer Ian’s only chauffeur.

  Not to be deterred, and unable to take a hint, I suggested he have forty winks and I’d be round about half eight. My vague idea was for us all to go out for a few drinks and a nice meal with Gillian, maybe a Chinese. I knew Ian had very strong feelings about Indian food. We’d then have a few more drinks and go on to one of Macc’s two nighteries, Images or Krumbles. I knew he was short of cash so I had come at the ready.

  I arrived at his door. ‘You two up for it then? I’ve got sixty quid to spend tonight.’

  ‘Oh no, I’m still worn out. I had to be Barney’s best man. What a palaver. I’m knackered.’

  Was I hearing things, ‘“best man”?’

  ‘Yes, him and Sue have got married.’

  Now I may have neglected to mention that Bernard is full of surprises. I apologise for that, though mostly logical and analytical Bernard’s capacity for the unexpected never ceases to amaze me. This one surely took the biscuit. I was flabbergasted, I had no idea. Had I missed something? Not that I would have expected an invitation or anything. You think you know someone and . . .

  Even Debbie looked surprised. I finally took the hint.

  Feeling deflated and let down, I called Gillian. The unexpected announcement rather put the mockers on my planned knees-up.

  “Fancy a night in instead?”

  I took my usual solitary course past the alehouses of the town, and picked up chips and gravy on my way to the Gilbert residence. We spent the night sitting on the kitchen floor listening to the radio.

  Not the night to remember we’d been expecting.

  So, by the end of 1978, as I recall, Ian was married, had his house in Barton Street and was going to be a father; Bernard had just married Sue and they sorted out a flat in Peel Green; Hooky had moved into a place in Moston with Iris; and Rob had a flat in Chorlton with his girlfriend Lesley, making me some sort of mummy’s boy stuck at home with my parents, living the shy bachelor life. A spoilt cuckoo.

  I would often get home just as my father was getting up to work and struggle to get to sleep over the strains of Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. I would fitfully sleep till lunchtime and then, bleary-eyed and sulky, bid farewell to my mother who would bemoan the state I left my room in. Then I’d fill up the Cortina and head off to Manchester for some band-related business or other. I very rarely watched TV and my music consumption was almost entirely Joy Division-related, apart from the odd occasion when I could coax the Ford radio to produce something more than static.

  One night, I was driving home from rehearsals with Ian and, just at the top of Kingsway, he spotted a couple of girls hitch-hiking.

  ‘Pull over, Steve! Let’s give them a lift.’

  ‘Er, OK,’ and I did a rather abrupt stop.

  The girls wanted a lift to Altrincham, technically in the wrong direction, but Ian insisted. Ushering them into the back seat, Ian launched into copping mode while I tried to figure out how to get to Altrincham and still get home before dawn.

  A few weeks later, on the way to another Sunday rehearsal, Ian seemed a bit more lethargic than normal. When pressed for the cause he eventually spilled that he had spent the night with one of the aforementioned lady hitchers and said not to mention it again. How he’d managed to cover that one with Debbie, I didn’t want to know. I believe this made him a bit of a dark horse in northern man mythology. A normal life was never going to work for Ian.

  * * *

  Hooky was always the first to blow, leaping off the stage wielding his bass like a war axe to deal with some gobber who got a bit threatening. Always wearing his heart on his sleeve and whatnot, you knew what you’d get from him. It was almost always about class. Or what he thought was class – he had a shoulder-borne chip. Like The Frost Report sketch with the Two Ronnies and Cleese, he was lower class and I was middle class, and that apparently made me less of something in his eyes. It was something I’d never given much thought to – where you came from was, to me, unimportant; it was who you were that counted. That someone might think I was a spoilt little rich kid hurt, I admit.

  Hooky was, and is, adversarial. ‘I am a punk,’ he would say as though being a punk gave him a right to do what he wanted and fuck you – which I guess to him it did. These things are always open to interpretation.

  He is a
lso very charming.

  Driving to gigs, he always led. If he found the Jag to be behind someone he knew at traffic lights, he would delight in nudging them forward across the lights, into oncoming traffic. John Peel was a famous celeb victim.

  Or pulling up alongside, he would chuck empty cans at my car, and Ian would return fire. The Cortina always had a healthy stock of ammunition, with empty cans rattling about in the footwell. This would quickly degenerate into a mobile battle like some modern chariot race or dual carriageway naval battle, as innocent bystanders were splattered with sticky residue from unfinished fizzy drinks of days gone by.

  Bernard, slightly more reserved and analytical, was usually the calmest, most thoughtful, and least likely to do the heavy lifting.

  Maybe I was a bit too passive and malleable. I put it down to the books on Buddhism and science fiction I was reading. I really was keen on the death of the ego and all that reality-is-illusory line. It was tied up with some of the rants that Timothy Leary did in Politics of Ecstasy (turn on, tune in, drop out), and would eventually get me into Robert Anton Wilson and Bob Shea’s epic trilogy Illuminatus! and then later, as I got slack, the Church of Bob Scientology piss-take.

  I’m not trying to criticise anyone here. It was the fact that we were all different that made the band what it was. I was a wimp. But a wimp with wheels.

  21

  UNKNOWN PLEASURES

  Buoyed up by the success of A Factory Sample and the gigs we’d been doing, it was time to move on to an album. Nobody had lost any money on A Factory Sample so, for Tony and Alan, an album could potentially be an earner for Factory. We’d explored other options, even done some demos with Marin Rushent for Genetic. But nothing ever came close to Factory’s appeal financially and artistically.

  It was that impetus thing again: the desire to keep moving on to the next thing, bigger and better, to climb higher, sometimes even before the paint was dry on the last thing.

  In April 1979, Martin was camped out at Strawberry in Stockport, working on John Cooper Clarke’s first album for CBS. A scheme was cooked up whereby we would go in when JCC was elsewhere, weekends usually, which, as we all still had day jobs, suited us to a T.