Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook

Not that I’d change anything, mind you. I’d stop Ian from 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 molded 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.