Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook

If only I’d known then what I know now, I’d have savored making our first album—because by the time we got to the second one there were already divisions beginning to form and we were very worried about Ian. Martin was having a hard time with the drugs so it got very fraught and very stressful. Then, on Movement, the first New Order album—well, we were fucked from that album on as far as I’m concerned.

So that was two days to record Unknown Pleasures. Closer took three weeks. Movement took about two months and Waiting for the Siren’s Call, New Order’s last, took three years.

Now, normally when you record a band you have a microphone on each of the instruments, and each records to a track on the master tape, but you get a bit of leakage from one microphone to another, so you’ll get a bit of the bass down the guitar mike and so on. If you want to feature, say, the guitar more prominently, then you turn up the guitar track, but because of the sound spill the other instruments come up too. Martin hated that.

So he set us up to get maximum separation, and the way he did that was to record us separately, especially the drums. Martin wanted them isolated so he could work on the drum sound, which of course he ended up doing a lot, creating that very clean, precise-sounding, almost clinical drum sound that became his trademark.

He loved the drums on it, he said; then said it would be great if they were separate. Next thing we knew he was getting Steve to take his kit apart. Off came the snare and the toms. Martin wanted zero spill from the mikes, so he had to record each drum individually. Of course that meant that Steve was rarely playing his whole kit. He was allowed to play only one drum at a time and ghosted the others. So what happened was that we ran through “She’s Lost Control” live, then Martin recorded the drum track, we took the kit apart, and Steve played his parts again—one drum at a time. It made everything very laborious and really hard for Steve, because he didn’t have a click track to keep time to, so he kept speeding up and slowing down. Steve had to learn how to play the kit, but play it like a drum machine.

you went into the studio now and wanted to re-create the sound of Unknown Pleasures, it would probably take you years.

For Unknown Pleasures we’d go in with our list of songs. We’d set up the instruments, sound check, “Right, ‘Disorder.’ ” We’d play “Disorder.” “Is that all right, Martin?” “No, didn’t like it. Try it slower but faster. Meaner but kinder.” We’d look at each other like, Oh, do fuck off. We’d play “Disorder” again. “How was that, Martin?” “That was better, yeah, a bit on the buttery side but fine; we’ll go with that one.”

His drug problem really only became a problem for us when it came to Movement, when he refused to start the session until we brought him a gram of coke. “Where the fuck are we going to get a gram of coke from?” We’d never even seen cocaine. (At that point, I mean. We’d certainly put that right later.)

Never is the saying “time is money” truer than when you’re in the studio. The average cost then was £1 per recording track per hour (so, for example, twenty-four-track: £24 per hour).

As a sound manipulator Martin was in a class of his own, and the atmosphere, clarity, and depth he gave to the songs is still astonishing.

Martin had fun with Joy Division because the songs were so fantastic. He didn’t have as much fun with Movement because, while the music was fantastic, we were lacking confidence on the lyrics and vocals.

And, along with fires and infestations of rats, the one thing you don’t want in a studio is a pissed-off Martin Hannett because he was ruthless, a right dictator at times.

you could put him in a studio with a band who’d been the best of friends for forty years and within five minutes Martin would have them at each other’s throats. So true.

His bag was winding p...

Barney was totally pissed off with it all, and quite rightly so, but Martin fed off that. You could see the look in his eyes, like, This’ll get him. He was looking for that spark, something intangible. But to him always a catalytic spark.

Did he get it? Well, it would be great if this particular anecdote ended with Bernard doing the performance of his life and “Cries & Whispers” becoming one of our greatest songs, but it doesn’t because we told Martin to fuck off and stormed out. So no, he didn’t get it. What he got was band and producer at each other’s throats, which was all part of his divide-and-conquer ethic.

All the things I now love about the album—the spacey, echoey ambient sound of it—were all the things I hated about it when I first heard it.

Now, of course, I can see the error of my ways. Now I can see that what Martin gave us, which was the greatest gift any producer can give any band. He gave us timelessness. Because Unknown Pleasures is just one of those things: it’s a truly ageless album. Think of the millions of albums influenced by Unknown Pleasures that have aged, while Unknown Pleasures hasn’t. That was his gift to us. We gave him the brilliant songs and he put them in little capsules so they’d stay brilliant forever.

He was always on the lookout for images to put on our stuff; and looking through a book, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy, he saw a diagram of a pulsar, showed it to Peter Saville, and that was it. Bernard doesn’t get nearly enough credit for that, because he couldn’t have made a better choice: that image is now forever associated with Joy Division and Unknown Pleasures the record.

I was just pleased that they didn’t intend to feature the band. We’d seen too many punk bands standing there scowling in black and white, their name sprayed on the wall behind them. We were all behind playing down the personality. Our image was a kind of anti-image, about anonymity and being chilly and gray and buttoned-up against the cold. In lots of our pictures we’re hunched up or have our backs turned, which was a mixture of being cold and not giving a fuck about the whole business of image, really. We didn’t want it to be about us. We certainly didn’t want it to be about our looks, ’cause we were such a bunch of ugly bastards. We wanted it all to be about the music.

He didn’t do it to create a mystique around the band but because he thought we were a couple of cretins. The result was that it created a mystique around the band. Absolute genius.

rented a van from Salford Van Hire and had to tell them I was moving house (they had a sign on the wall refusing to hire to “musicians, hawkers, and gypsies”).

Margox was there. That’s Margi Clarke, the actress from Letter To Brezhnev and Corrie, of course, but back then she was called Margox and she did bits of singing and TV presenting and she was there at 86a with Alan’s flatmate. This was about seven p.m. and she said, “Oh, what you got there, love? Is this your record, like? Can I have one?” We ignored her and they disappeared off into the bedroom. Sure enough, as we loaded the records in we did it to a background noise of them having very noisy orgasms, thinking, Fucking hell, could this be any fucking worse?

She came floating out much later, when me and Rob were sitting there dripping in sweat from having carried ten thousand copies of Unknown Pleasures up the stairs. “Can I have a record?” she said. Seems a bit mean now, but it was just the culmination of a bad day; I’m ashamed to say that Rob told her to fuck right off again.

Still, we loved her. How can you not love Margi Clarke? That really earthy, rude character you see onscreen is like a toned-down version of the real one. What you see is what you get there, let me tell you. She is wonderful.

So when we were in the dressing room before the show, and Twinny winked at us before saying to her, “Show us your tits, love,” I don’t know why we were surprised when she went, “Here y’go, la,” lifted up her top, and showed us them in all their glory. We went bright red and stayed bright red when she didn’t put them away. Just waited until we were at maximum discomfort, our faces burning so hot you could fry eggs on them and silently plotting revenge on Twinny and his big mouth, until at last she put us out of our misery, saying, “That taught you a lesson, lads?” “Yes,” we mumbled like naughty schoolboys.

The version we recorded during the session had an organ on it, an old one that Barney had borrowed from his gran. She’d bought it from Woolworths in the 1950s and it was made of old, hard plastic that had gone brittle by the time we got our hands on it. Had a wild sound, though. We liked it straightaway, thought it sounded immense and would be great on “Chance.”

There was no case for it but we stowed it on top of the gear, until Vini came along, put his guitar on top of the stack, and knocked the Woolies organ off. All that brittle plastic just shattered when it hit the floor. Gutted. We loved that organ.

Natalie had been born while we were recording Unknown Pleasures, and the fact that I can remember so little about it says less for my memory and more for the fact that Ian hardly mentioned

I don’t think he would have said anything at all apart from the fact that he’d fainted at the sight of Debbie giving birth—falling, splitting his head open, and leaving Debbie to give birth alone while the nurses looked after him. We asked him more about the cut. In Touching from a Distance Debbie says that Ian had had a fit and cut his head, so what the truth of the matter is I’m not completely sure. All I know is that’s how we found out Ian had become a dad.

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.

The way we saw it, looking at most band interviews, was that if you took the name of the band off they were all exactly the same.

So we insulated ourselves against it by being awkward bastards right from the beginning of any interview. “Tell us about your new album.” “No.” I used to love that. I once did an interview with John Peel’s producer, John Waters. It was for the first Peel session and he said, “So, tell us how the session’s going?” “It’s all right.” And he went, “Oh right. Would you like to tell us about your plans?” “No.” “Oh, right.” Afterward he said it was the most difficult interview he’d ever done, which of course I thought was hilarious. But it wasn’t really a plan. Being bloody-minded just amused me—and when it became part of our persona

It’s one of the eternal frustrations of being in a group. One minute you’re playing to a handful of people yawning their heads off, then six months or eight months later you’re playing the exact same material to a packed audience all going bonkers and you think, Where the fuck were you when we played at Oldham Tower Club?

The beauty of Joy Division is that we never made much money while the band existed so there was nothing to sully it—no piles of drugs or cases of booze in the dressing room. We went everywhere in a convoy of knackered van and Steve’s Cortina and stayed with friends—no hotels for us, just the odd B&B.

(Publishing, as in who wrote what in the songs, brings nearly all bands down. I remember the immortal quote from the Happy Mondays: “Why is the one playing the maracas getting as much as me who writes the songs?” Ironically, Bez is now as important as all the songwriters, if not more. How the world turns.)

“Oh no, don’t touch that. Touch that and we’re going out on strike, the lot of us. That light belongs to the Lighting Union.”

He was absolutely devastated about it later. As soon as we started making it Tony was like, “Come back, I’ll manage you now!” But Rob saw him off. Little tug-of-love between managers there. But again it was one of those funny things that starts happening when you see a bit of success, like the press suddenly becoming interested. A manager who turned you down suddenly knocking on your door.

That’s what happens. We were still the same band, still doing the same things we’d always been doing:

What we had was confidence and belief. Staying in Manchester and staying with Factory meant that we were staying with people who’d believed in us right from the beginning—who didn’t like us just because we’d had some success, who would have liked us if we’d been successful or not—and that made us different and them special.

It turned out to be one of those brilliant gigs, because this this was the first time I remember seeing the audience mouthing along with the words—and that is a really Whoa moment when you’re in a band. Quite an odd sensation, really, when you think of where the song has come from—

So it was a storming gig, apart from the fact that halfway through a guy climbed out of the audience—a punk who got up onstage. We thought, This guy’s come up to have a dance or whatever, and kept on playing, but he sauntered right past us and went back to where the dressing room was. We were looking at one another, like, What the fuck’s he playing at? but still playing, when a couple of minutes later he reappeared and went to climb down off the stage back into the crowd. I stopped him. Still playing, I said, “Where the fuck have you been?” “Oh, I just went for a piss,” he said. I said, “In our fucking dressing room? You cheeky get,” and kicked him right offstage. Fast-forward to about twenty years later, and this guy comes up to me, can’t remember where it was, and says, “Hello.” “All right, mate,” He said, “I saw you when you were Joy Division, at the Nashville Rooms in London. I was with my friend, who got up onstage and went for a piss in the dressing room, and you kicked him offstage.” “Yeah, I remember him,” I said. “The cheeky bastard.” He said, “Yeah, well, he ended up hanging himself.” I went, “Oh. Fuck. He didn’t hang himself because of that, did he?” “Oh, no, not because of that. It was a few years after that.” I said, “Well thank fuck for that!”

Turned out the forty-footer had hit us at about seventy miles an hour, shunting us and sending us spinning in two complete 360s; it had taken out the back of the van, snapping the back axle and flattening the rear doors. My bass cab had come shooting out the back like a comedy coffin, straight under the wheels of the forty-footer.

It wasn’t really until the next morning—well, it was the afternoon by the time I woke up—that the reality of it all hit me: the van was history. It was an ex-van. It had ceased to be. No more driving the van for me. From then on either Terry, Twinny, or Dave Pils drove a rented van, and every night after a gig I lived it up with the rest of the band in the bar, boozing and trying to pull girls. On the one hand, it was absolutely magnificent. On the other hand, I ended up an alcoholic.

So there you go. You shouldn’t trust a word I say. Both Bernard and I had a go at bagging Annik, actually, but she got the measure of us straightaway and we were both a bit pissed off when Ian got her. Not that they were ever lovers. I suppose he couldn’t because of all the pills he was on, or maybe didn’t want to . . . How romantic.

I do think that’s why God gave us bands—so ugly blokes can cop off.

I’ve no doubt he was different with us from how he was with Debbie and Annik, because that was the people pleaser in him. The Ian who was with Debbie is the one she talks about in her book; he’s the one in Control, and you see the Annik-Ian there too. But what you don’t see—and what’s never really come out—is the Ian we saw in the band.

We’d deliver Ian home and he’d be fucked. That’s what you do as a group: you pick them up, take them away, drop them back off, and let someone else pick up the pieces.

When he didn’t seem to be getting at all pissed we started putting triple and quadruple vodkas in his drinks. Until, after a while, we realized that we were both pissed as farts and Doctor Silk as sober as a magician who had seen right through us, knew exactly what we were up to, and had been swapping the drinks round all night—giving us the spiked ones and supping the alcohol-free ones himself—which was exactly what we deserved.

Straightaway I saw red, pulled my guitar off, held it by the neck, and swung it at the boot boy, all in one movement. Trouble was, I was pissed. I don’t think I even connected. Instead what happened was the weight of the bass pulled me offstage and into the audience where the same kid and his mates descended on me. Swarmed all over, like those little dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and held me down. Then the kicks started landing. I thought, This is it. I’m going to die.