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His songs from that point were like having a conversation with a genius, sort of profound and impenetrable at the same time.
Every now and then one of us suggested that maybe we should drive up to Pennine and beat the shit out of the engineer because there was no doubt about it: he was the one to blame; he knew we were inexperienced. You can get only three or four minutes of great-sounding music on each side of a seven-inch single. That’s why, when I’d listened to “Sebastian” by Cockney Rebel all those years ago, I’d had to turn the record over halfway through the song. I’d always thought it was a bit of a gimmick but suddenly I knew why—and why most hit singles were three minutes long. It’s because that’s the ideal
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The phone would go down and I’d be left wondering, Who the hell are Warsaw Pakt? Our group wasn’t getting gigs because we weren’t Warsaw Pakt.
There’s even a Joy Division in Germany that does marital aids, vibrators and stuff: “joy sticks.” Which is pretty weird when you consider the origin of the name.
What he construed as bootlegging was someone copying his LP, selling it, and not paying him royalties, whereas I thought of bootlegging as somebody recording you live and putting it out as a live LP. So I was arguing from one standpoint saying, “Well, it’s a compliment, and it’s good that the fans do it,” and he was going, “Shut the fuck up, motherfucker, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” because of course we were talking about totally different things.
The only band ever to get fined for not doing their own T-shirts—£20,000. Bang!
But there was nothing more to it than a bunch of lads—Barney and Ian in particular—who were a bit obsessed with the war. Everybody was back then.
But it was about being shocking, not about ideology. We didn’t have a political bone in our bodies—none of us did, not even Ian. Arty stuff was what he liked, not political.
Steve was so creative on the drums that we were riffing off that, and for the first time it felt like the group was four people matched in ability and vision.
Bernard’s a brilliant guitarist. He knew exactly what he was doing, and that sparseness and space of his guitar lines was one of things that made Joy Division special.
I couldn’t even hear it above Barney’s amp, not unless I played high on the neck of the guitar, and it was Ian who said, “Oh, Hooky, when you play high, it sounds really good. We should work on that. Barney, you play the bar chords. Hooky, you play high and Steve do some of them jungle drums. . . .” That was how we got it—the Joy Division sound.
It did my head in, really freaked me out. It was exactly the same, apart from the fact that the pictures were missing from the wall and you could see where the wallpaper around them had faded. I was bawling like a baby that night, I’m telling you. It brought everything back. Ian. Joy Division. We never used to talk about it. The years that followed Ian’s death were for getting on with New Order and the Haçienda, not for mourning and wallowing, but every now and then something like that would catch you unawares. You’d walk into a room you associated with Ian and suddenly you were poleaxed.
But it came to an abrupt end when the cloakroom gave Barney’s leather jacket away one night—he went ballistic and we were barred.
Not long ago I was DJing in Eden in Ibiza with this guy called Dave Booth from Garlands in Liverpool. On the flight home we got talking about places in Manchester and he mentioned that he DJed at Pips. I went, “Pips? You’re joking! Me and Barney took our first record to Pips for the DJ to play.” “Yeah,” he said. “That was me. I was the one who put it on—cleared the fucking floor, it did.” Small world . . .
You watch Control and the character comes into our lives like a whirlwind, with a big personality right from the start, but in real life it wasn’t really like that. At first, he was calm, rational, quietly spoken and very logical, always scribbling away in his notebooks. Later he got more like his character in Control, when he became a very domineering, almost intimidating personality—he was a big guy and he used it. He could cut you dead and often did. He had a biting tongue. But in him we knew we had someone who shared our vision and had the same ideals, who wasn’t going to suggest we hire
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The funny thing about writing a song—any song—is that you never know how good it is when you write it. The last one always seems the best.
But we never thought, This is a classic. That isn’t your place. We knew they were all right, mind you. But the best we hoped for was that they matched up to the caliber of the other stuff, the stuff we knew people liked. It was only when we played them live and gauged the reaction that we started to get an idea of how good they really were.
We were looking at one another, like, What the fuck’s going on here? because we’d never experienced that kind of reaction before. Looking at one another we were thinking that, maybe, just maybe, we might be able to make a go of this, a living out of it. We might just be able to pull this off. It was a big moment for the band. A big confidence-booster. The gig itself, well, it went off all right,
So I’ve got to say—and God strike me down for it—I wasn’t that bothered when a section of the crowd took exception to his T-shirt, dragged him off the stage, and leathered him. Funnily enough, his fists weren’t his side-arms.
It was strange: when someone else was doing it you knew you could do it better, but when you did it everything went wrong.
Cabaret Voltaire without the songs, really, which is saying something.
The rest of us were going, “Yeah, yeah, do whatever you want, Rob.” Might as well have had rings through our noses, we were that easily led. But not Ian. It didn’t take long for the pair of them to bang heads, the two dominant personalities of the group fighting for control.
double. All of which meant that I ended up playing the bass high, which is my sound, but with the lowest strap, because what happens is that the lower you play, the more you have to bend your hand over, to play the notes, and that’s the hard bit, that bend. Which is also why I make so many bum notes. I’m renowned for them.
Money never came into it, of course. That was one thing we never really talked about in the early days. “How much are we getting for doing it?” “What’s the deal on the record?” “What’s the split, man?” There was none of that, which was wonderful because it was just about going forward, working with people you liked, and trusting that the rewards would come. Now, having had more experience, I know that we should have done a deal. Or certainly Tony should have done a deal. The songs on the Factory sampler belonged to us, even though he’d paid for them to be recorded. No way would that happen
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The thing about Ian was that he was into the bands we all grew to love; he was into them first. Not only that but he could also talk in depth about them in a way that appealed to Tony. You could tell that Ian was pleased to have this equally knowledgeable guy around, and you could tell that Tony felt the same way.
The idea was that Martin was going to produce the bands, Saville would do the sleeves, Tony would be the talking head, and Alan Erasmus would be the enforcer. Saying that, I don’t think that from that day to this anyone has ever figured out exactly what Alan Erasmus did in Factory—he was just incredibly important in some way no one can seem to figure out. He always was, and remains, a complete mystery, a true enigma. The funny thing about Alan is that he always moans about his lack of presence in the Factory legacy but just you try coaxing him out of the woodwork to get involved.
That and the nonstop smoking—dope and cigarettes—so that the atmosphere in the control room was like that of a wizard surrounded by smoke and in charge of his strange machines.
My main feeling was just, yes, because my parts sounded good. It’s only when your work starts disappearing that you get fed up.
As a musician your ego and self-confidence really grows if your part is getting used, whereas they can take a huge blow if your part is downplayed, which is what happened to me on “Atmosphere” later on. On that record Martin mixed the bass down, but when we played it live it was loud in the mix.
“We’ve had reports that your van has been seen in the red-light districts of Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds, Moss Side . . .” He looked at me. “Want to tell me why that is, son?” For a moment my mind went blank. All I could think was: Yorkshire Ripper. This was during the time they were searching for him. He preyed on prostitutes in Leeds, Bradford, Manchester . . . “Oh, hang on a minute,” I said, “I’m in a group. I play bass in a group. Where you’re saying, they’re gigs we’ve played.” They looked at each other, all doubtful-like. “What’s your group called?” “Joy Division.” “Never heard of
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The next day I got a call from Steve. “All right, Hooky. Have you had the police round?” he said, voice trembling. “Yeah,” I said. “They came and asked me about the red-light district and all that. Did they come to you?” “Yeah,” he said. “They came round and I panicked and they arrested me.”
A bit of an ill-fated tour, that one, because the Rezillos fell out following the first gig, after which it was just a matter of time before they split.
“Listen, right, if you lot don’t stop spitting, we’re not going to play.” The crowd stopped. It lasted for about three seconds before he was showered in the biggest rain of spit I’ve ever seen in my life. Everybody just spat at him all at once—and he shrugged and played on. Should have walked off. That was how Joe Strummer got hepatitis, from swallowing someone’s spit. Disgusting.
That night we discovered that there was something wrong with Ian. Something really wrong.
“There’s the stage; set up and shut up.”
There was a pelican crossing outside the docks, right opposite work, where I always used to fall asleep. There was something about reaching that point, eight o’clock in the morning, feeling knackered but nice and warm in the van, and just . . . feeling . . . sleepy . . . My snoozing hotspot, that was.
Doing the session was mind-blowing. For a start, when you work for the BBC you get paid personally: the money comes to you, not to the group. (Later, in New Order, I used to love doing Top of the Pops because I got a check for £280 when I was getting nothing off the group.)
I mean, writing songs is easy when you’re just starting out. It gets a lot harder and takes longer when you’ve written two or three hundred. You get overdrawn at the riff bank.
even though the seed of the song had been Kraftwerk, it wouldn’t sound like Kraftwerk at all. That was the art. It sounded like Joy Division.
writing the songs was dead easy because the group was really balanced; we had a great guitarist, a great drummer, a great bass player, a great singer. As soon as Ian died it became difficult. He had an ear for us, a great ear, and all bands need one of those.
you could tell he would have gotten so much better because he had that ear—he thought like a musician. The way it worked was that he’d listen to us jamming, and then direct the song until it was . . . a song. He stood there like a conductor and picked out the best bits.
Peter Saville has a wonderful theory that musicians stop writing great music when they learn about the formal process of making music. Why? Because then they won’t take any chances.
Then, when you get older and you know a lot more about how music is supposed to sound, you go, “Oh, that G, B, that jars a little doesn’t it? Oh no, try E flat. That’s better,” and the edge is gone.
The more proficient you become at writing music the fewer chances you take because you become aware of all the rules and theories that may well be the proper way to do things but end up constricting you, throttling all the creativity out of what you’ve got. No more risk-taking. Back then we didn’t know rules or theory.
It doesn’t matter what you’re playing really, as long as you mean it.
Nobody starts a band so they can stay in their hometown. You yearn for London and Paris and America and all that—all the freedom that comes with it. We weren’t really loyal to any Manchester scene. We’d always been a bit outside it anyway.
Rob, being nothing if not a man of many contradictions, had a sudden change of heart and decided he didn’t like the idea of an advance. They were like loans, he said. Fuck loans.
I’d been reading this article about how nine out of ten Jag owners don’t lock the boot of their car. So I thought, I wonder if that’s true . . . Tried his boot and, lo and behold, it was unlocked. When I looked inside it was full of stolen car radios; you could tell they were stolen by the way the wires were dangling off from where they’d been ripped out. Me and Terry were looking at each other, thinking, Fuck, Martin’s got a boot full of stolen car radios. And then, Wonder if he’d miss a couple . . .
We never asked him, and anyway he was too busy moaning about the boil on his bum. It was giving him real gyp and he was in agony with it. So much that he couldn’t sleep in his bed and had to sleep in his car instead—couldn’t get comfortable otherwise. He went on about that a lot, his boil, and it meant he kept having to get up to walk around and ease the pain, but otherwise the session was great.
He was a lot better than Martin Hannett in one respect: he spoke English and you could understand what he said. But he was nowhere near as exciting or unpredictable and, to be honest, once I’d heard the results I much preferred Hannett’s production to his.
