Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook

“Joy Divisions” was the name given to groups of Jewish women kept in the concentration camps for the sexual pleasure of the Nazi soldiers. The oppressed, not the oppressors.

So that was decided: we were Joy Division. Little did we know what we were letting ourselves in for, that for years people would be asking us, “Are you Nazis?” “No. We’re not fucking Nazis. We’re from Salford.”

He was going, “Fuck off, he’s a wanker kicking broken glass round . . .” And we were going, “Yeah, but that wanker’s our singer, mate—he’s the singer of our band—you’ve got to let him in. Come on, mate . . .”

but I gave him eleven quid for it, which was all the money I had and a fortune in those days. Of course that meant I couldn’t afford to buy any records, which my mother thought was hilarious.

Still, at least I finally had something to listen to. Or so I thought. Turned out I couldn’t play them—since they were for a jukebox they needed an adaptor—and it took me another week to steal one!

You never had anything so you took it. Same attitude to music: you’ve got to start somewhere. The difference was that nobody expected that sort of behavior from us in Joy Division or New Order because we had an arty, intellectual image.

First off, I was intrigued by the idea of a group who seemed, I don’t know, human compared to bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, who seemed, to a working-class tosser from Salford, so out of my league they might as well have lived on another planet. I mean, I’d never have looked at Led Zep and thought, I’m going to be the next John Paul Jones. He was like some kind of god up there. I loved the music. I loved watching it. But the idea of emulating them was ludicrous.

We reached the headmaster’s office and the guy from NME said to the secretary, “Oh hello, I’ve got Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner here from the successful group New Order, and they’re old boys from the school. We just wondered if it was possible to take their pictures in the hall for the New Musical Express, the biggest music paper in England.” She was nice enough, quite excited really, and said, “If you wait one second I’ll just ask the headmaster.” And she disappeared off into his office. Then all of a sudden we heard, “What? That pair of dickheads!” Then the office door flew open and out burst our old geography teacher, Dave Cain, now the headmaster, roaring at us: “You pair of bastards!” Oh dear—we used to make his life a misery. “Get out!” he screamed at us. “Get out, you pair of twats!”

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 stunned.

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.

I want to do that. No. I fucking need to do that.

That was what I wanted to do: tell everyone to Fuck Off.

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.

At that time if you put a group of Londoners—Cockneys, in other words—and a group of Mancunians into a municipal building at the same time, the, shall we say, “regional differences” meant a fight was bound to break out—which it did.

Together with the Drones and Slaughter & the Dogs they were the backbone of the punk scene and helped make Manchester the major punk city after London.

The people who stuck out tended to be the well-known ones,

Me and Barney were pretty quiet. We’d just stand on the sidelines 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.

He was just a kid with “Hate” on his coat, just a normal kid.

Of the two portrayals of him on film, I prefer the one in 24 Hour Party People. The guy in Control, Sam Riley, played him as being much more arty and conventionally pretty than he was in real life, whereas Sean Harris in 24 Hour Party People had a bit more of the real-life Ian’s edginess and intensity. Neither was perfect and neither was totally off the mark, but for my money Harris was the more accurate.

That was the thing about that period. We’d all been inspired. We were all desperate to just go ahead and do it.

After the gig it was bedlam outside, with the punks getting hammered left, right, and center. We flagged down a passing cop car and asked for help getting past these lunatics and the copper said, “Run behind the van and we’ll escort you to your cars.” We all trooped behind, but as he set off he put his foot right down and sped off—leaving us at the mercy of the mob. The bastard. Luckily Terry’s car was nearby so we dived in and escaped.

Once you get football fans coming—the twats who just want to spit and throw bottles—it’s time to move on, and people like the Buzzcocks and then us, Magazine, the Fall, and Cabaret Voltaire were eventually able to find a way forward.

He was my oldest friend and my sounding post for the start of my moaning about Barney. We were always very close; Barney hated this and he took it out on Terry sometimes.

What was obvious about Ian was that he was pouring everything into it; he wasn’t playing at being in a band. My lyrics were just words on a page whereas his were coming from somewhere else, his soul.

But looking back that’s exactly what he was: a people pleaser; he could be whatever you wanted him to be. A poetic, sensitive, tortured soul, the Ian Curtis of the myth—he was definitely that. But he could also be one of the lads—he was one of the lads, as far as we were concerned. That was the people pleaser in him, the mirror. He adapted the way he behaved depending on who he was with. We all do a bit, of course, but with Ian the shift was quite dramatic. Nobody was better at moving between different groups of people than he was. But I also think this was an aspect of his personality that ended up being very damaging to him. He had three personas he was trying to juggle: he had his married-man persona, at home with the wife; the laddish side; and the cerebral, literary side. By the end he was juggling home life and band life, and had two women on the go. There were just too many Ians to cope with.

only to find him and his mates flicking one another’s bare arses with their towels. If we’d had any doubts about sacking him, they were laid to rest at the sight of that because offhand I can’t actually think of anything less “us” than a wet-towel fight.

couldn’t believe it. I joined a band to tell everyone to fuck off, and if somebody said to me, “Your image is shit,” I’d have gone, “Fuck off, knob head!” And if someone had said, “Your music’s shit,” I would have nutted them. That to me is what’s lacking in groups. They’ve missed out that growing-up stage of being bloody-minded and fucking clueless. You have to have ultimate self-belief. You have to believe right from the word go that you’re great and that the rest of the world has to catch up with you.

During their set they played “Chinese Rocks,” which was their big hit, three times. I was looking at the crowd, thinking, You’re pissed off? We’ve had to put up with this all day.

These guys could barely stay awake, let alone change the world.

The gig would also be Tony Tabac’s last, as he was arrested shortly afterward.

Tony, it turned out, was a bit of an entrepreneur. As far as I can remember he came up with a foolproof plan to sell some dope. He would drop the price; undercut all the other dealers. Brilliant: why had no one thought of it before? Why? Because as soon as the other dealers heard, they shopped him and he got busted by the cops.

A black guy wearing a flat cap, he looked quite tasty and we were thinking, “We’d better be careful here . . .” and it turned out to be Alan Erasmus, who later became a partner in Factory and who was indeed very tasty. I think he threatened to throw Peter Saville out of a window once. Can’t blame him for that, though: Peter can be very annoying sometimes.

So we did. Then they set up their gear. But what they did—and this is a trick I’ve seen repeated many times since, a really sneaky one—they did their sound check then fucked off, leaving their gear onstage.

Their roadies were assuring us that the band was on their way but it was all a ruse. In the end they came back really late—about the time of the headline slot, funnily enough, so it looked like they were headlining—did their set and by the time they came off most of the audience had gone home.

We got together that night, started going out, ended up having two lovely kids and stayed together for ten years. Saying that, I was away for eight-and-a-half of them.

We were looking at one another, like, “What the fuck? He seemed so nice . . .” as Ian threw himself to the floor and began writhing around in the broken glass, cutting himself in the process. Any remaining audience members were either scared half to death or laughing at him, while we were just freaked out. This was our mate going mental here. In the end he returned to the stage and we finished the gig, watching as what was left of the crowd scarpered rather than risk another outburst. Nobody fancied being pelted with more broken glass or bits of broken table. It was one of our worst gigs ever.

when he blotted his copybook with us all by coming to the front of the stage, bringing his high-hat with him, and then playing said high-hat.

Bit muffled, a little distant, but you could hear my bass, Barney sawing away, Steve Brotherdale doing the business, Ian doing his punky singing—yet to fully develop his baritone, of course; still doing the punky shouting back then but sounding great. We’re sounding like a band, a good band. The kind of band you’d want playing at your venue, surely. . . . Then suddenly I heard the theme tune to Coronation Street drown it all out. And next I hear this voice, Terry’s mum, Eileen, saying, “Come on now, Terry, your tea’s ready. . . .” Now, back then the only way you could record tape-to-tape was by using two little flat cassette players, put speaker-to-speaker, which was what Terry had been doing. But the dozy bugger had been recording them while he was watching telly and waiting for his mum to do his tea. No wonder no

one wanted to book us.

After V2 faded away, well, I went in a McDonald’s about ten years ago, ordered a quarter pounder (no ketchup, no cheese) and medium fries, and the guy serving me went, “Hooky?” And I went, “Yeah?” He said, “Don’t you remember me? Steve Brotherdale.” There he was. Let that be a lesson to you.

You know exactly what I’m going to say now: he was mega, an absolute revelation. He had all that power that we were looking for but with a texture we hadn’t heard before. Most drummers just hammer it out. Steve was playing the drums. You could tell he’d been playing with a jazz trio, because it was as though he’d somehow combined the feel and intricacy of jazz with the power and energy of rock and punk. We were over the moon. At last, we had a drummer: a drummer straight from the drummer genie who was not only brilliant but also had his own kit and his own car.

Twinny I’d met in the Flemish Weaver and got to know him over a beer. But then a couple of days later when I said hello at the bar he was really fucking rude, looked at me like I was off my head, and told me to fuck off. I went back to my corner moaning about it to Greg Wood, like, “That fucking Twinny’s a weird one, isn’t he? I had a good crack with him the other night and he’d just told me to do one.” “Why do you think he’s called Twinny?” said Greg. “That’s his twin, y’dickhead.” Ah . . .

That was pretty much how the alliances went for the rest of our careers together. I mean, I loved them as bandmates—I loved the group—thought they were great musicians and we really clicked as songwriters. But as people? As friends? Not really. We were individuals, me, Steve, and Bernard. The glue that held us together, the driving force of the band, was Ian. Us three were concentrating on just our bits, with him holding it all together. That’s why we never really looked at his lyrics until after he’d died. It was because we were all just concentrating on doing our bit. Three little musical islands with Ian pulling us all together.

Rob Gretton was our manager by then, so he became the glue that held us together—as people, at least—but when he died of a heart attack in 1999, well, that left nobody. And it’s been downhill ever since—until, at the time of writing, it’s as bad as it could possibly be. Joy Division and then New Order were ships that needed captains, but our captains kept on dying on us.

Now, back then, there was none of this, “Oh, bloody hell, not another gig.” It was, “Yeah, let’s go.” Of course, we weren’t used to playing outside Manchester, so were all out of bed at the crack of dawn with excitement, me having to run off the adrenaline as usual, and us turning up about midday only to find the venue shut up and locked till five. Great.

We’d regret all that later, of course. Because all it did was give more ammo—if you’ll forgive the phrase—to those who said we were glorifying Nazis.

Another unpleasant aspect of this was our first brush with publishing and a “proper” publishing/record company. Virgin, Richard Branson’s label, decided to sign the bands’ publishing rights for the tracks featured on the record. Each band would get £200 advance on signing, a fortune then, and all bands would receive 10 percent of the publishing. Now, that didn’t seem like a bad deal, 10 percent each—good old Virgin—and we couldn’t sign fast enough. Afterward, though, we found out that what they meant was that all bands would receive 10 percent in total, as in 2 percent each. We got two pence on the pound for whatever Virgin earned on the sale of our track, signed away in perpetuity, as everything was in those days.

If you’re in a band, take my advice and get a lawyer, whatever stage you’re at—in fact, it’s even more important at the start. Don’t ever sign your publishing away; you wrote the songs and they should always be yours. Those starting mistakes will haunt you till you die.

I’ve never been able to tune. I’m tone-deaf. Barney always did it for me, much to his delight. Like, if I knocked the guitar onstage and it went out of tune, he’d have to come over and retune it, with a big piss-take grin on his face, or I couldn’t play. I’m telling you, the best moment in my musical life was when they invented a portable guitar tuner in a foot pedal. I went out and bought four. Fantastic, because you don’t half feel like an idiot onstage when your band mate has to come over and tune your guitar for you.

But like I say, I never paid too much attention to the lyrics at that time. I kind of knew that they were good, and that there was something really special about them, but mainly I just appreciated that they sounded good, and that Ian singing them sounded great and looked great.