Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook

Martin said if we could make the mix sound good on the Auratones then it would sound good on anything. Nobody in their right mind would listen to Auratones for pleasure because they sound rotten; they soak up all the reflections and echo and wetness on a track, make everything sound dead dry and boring. But that was Martin’s scheme: make the record sound good on them and it’ll lop your head off on a set of decent speakers. Listening to a mix with him meant getting in his car and having him drive you around while you checked out how it sounded. He hadn’t bothered screwing them down, these speakers, so they just used to roll around the floor of the Volvo, and because Martin was such a terrible driver they did a lot of rolling around.

Martin’s big thing was still clarity. He always said that for a recording to have lasting effect and impact it had to have clarity and separation.

He wanted us to sound like—how did he describe it?—adult gothic music or something.

I’ve no doubt that the likes of Genesis and Annik thought they knew the “real” Ian, and that he was most at home in “their” world. But we thought we knew the real Ian. Probably Debbie did too. What I’ve realized in the years since is that the truth was a lot more complex and in-between than any of us really knew at the time. Thinking about it, I bet even Ian didn’t know who the “real” Ian was.

I feel terrible about it now, of course. Now I’m older and wiser, and now I’ve looked at his lyrics and worked out what a tortured soul he was. We should have left him alone to have his love affair but we didn’t because he wasn’t tragic Ian Curtis the genius then. He was just our mate and that’s what you did with your mates up North: you ripped the piss out of them.

First we smeared their minibus handles and windscreen in jam and marmalade, and tied toilet rolls to their exhaust; then we prepared eggs and pots and pans full of water. When ACR finally made their way out we were waving good-bye to them from the flat windows, watching as they got to the bus and found the jammy traps. Next thing we were pelting them with water and eggs and killing ourselves as we watched them trying and failing to wrench open the doors and get out of the line of fire. Finally they managed it and tore away, with two long trails of pink bog paper hanging off the back off the bus. So Ian had a point. We were sneaky, japing tossers. Not long before he would have been a part of it too. So if we resented him for being Martin’s favorite and having a fit foreign girlfriend, well, maybe we also thought, We’re losing our mate here.

So off I trotted and found him in the toilet, where he was sparkled on the floor, big gash in his head. He’d gone to the toilet, had a fit, fallen forward, and banged his head on the sink, which had knocked him out. Guess what? We brought him round, he said he was all right, and we carried on. I should call the book that, shouldn’t I? He Said He Was All Right So We Carried On.

So Martin went off to talk and of course, being nosy, I poked my head around the door to get a look at these kids, who it turned out were called U2. I don’t know if it had been raining outside but they looked like something the cat had dragged in, and they were sitting in reception staring at Martin with complete awe. Very funny. They were huge fans of Joy Division, it turned out, and wanted Martin to produce their first single, “11 O’Clock Tick Tock,” which he did. Years later I got the shock of my life when Tony told me one story about Bono. It seems that after Ian had died Tony met Bono somewhere, and Bono was telling Tony not to worry because he would take over from where Ian left off.

but just look at how our two careers went. Seven years later we’d been stung with a tax bill for nearly a million quid and losing all our money on a nightclub, while they’d gone off and made The Joshua Tree, become the biggest band in the world, and hadn’t opened a nightclub. And we all know how they feel about tax. They did everything right, in other words.

I was always fascinated by the way the apostrophes both go the same way. They don’t frame the word Closer as you expect them to. I did ask him recently what that was all about, and it turns out that what I thought were apostrophes are actually full stops from the second century BC, and the reason they go that way is to do with the angle the original stonemason leaned when he was tapping out the words and punctuation marks.

Quite shocking really. By the time we chose those pictures, he had less than two months to live.

wasn’t until years and years later that we visited Australia—as New Order, of course—and discovered the truth. Somebody at the Australian record company had simply laid the actual record over the film, and it wasn’t even properly synchronized.

Our ultimate aim was just to be ourselves, to do things the way we wanted them done, and we’d insist out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Rob was always in our corner. Tony was always in our corner. You might call them mistakes but at least they were mistakes made on our own terms. Mistakes that then

Barney rang to see if he wanted to come out but Ian said no, because he was going to go to Debbie’s, and of course that’s what he did. He went up to Debbie’s. They had an argument and she went to work. And he went and hanged himself.

I said, “Right,” and went numb. (I stayed numb for days, actually, as though my brain were frozen.)

After a while Iris said, “Who was that on the phone, by the way?” “Oh, that,” I said. “That was the police ringing to tell me about Ian.” “What about him?” “He’s killed himself.”

They were talking about him as if he were a stranger and the inquest found that he’d taken his own life under the influence of alcohol.

“What did you do with the mac?” I asked. “Took it down the charity shop, Hooky,” I thought, You silly sod. The charity shop? Who would do something like that?

Corky said, “What happened to it, Hooky, that scarf?” I thought, Oh fuck—because with a sudden jolt I realized I’d taken it to the charity shop. I’d forgotten it was Ian’s scarf and donated it. What an idiot, I thought. Who would do something like that?

suppose in the end it’s almost too easy to look back and say what you should have done, how you might have changed things. How you might have done things differently and ultimately stopped Ian from doing what he did. What’s harder—what’s much, much harder—is to accept what you actually did do. Accept what you did and live with it. At that point I thought that the worst thing that had happened was me losing a friend, the band losing a member. It took me a long time to realize that a child had lost a father, a mother and father had lost a son, a sister had lost a brother, a wife had lost a husband, a mistress had lost a lover. All a lot more important than me and the band; we pale in significance. You’re selfish when you’re young and I suppose in many ways that’s self-preservation. Now I’m embarrassed to have put us first. Even after writing and researching this book I’m no clearer as to why he decided to end it on that

But back then—then it was like the group disowned the group.

I mean, Joy Division’s popularity skyrocketed: “Love Will Tear Us Apart” came out and was a great success, then Closer, but we didn’t promote them, didn’t play them, didn’t read reviews of them, didn’t want to know about sales, nothing. Didn’t care about them.

It was weird because I was looking for Ian to tell me if it was any good or not. Realizing that we’d lost our spotter, our mentor.

Realizing that suddenly we had to find a new way of working that didn’t rely on him. We had to learn to record everything, play it back, and pick out the good bits ourselves. We never considered carrying on as Joy Division, though.

We had made a pact years before that if one of us didn’t want to do it anymore, or if anything happened to any one of us, then Joy Division would be over. The group was finished. I mean, the desire to carry on was uppermost, but as for trying to carry on as Joy Division with one of us lot singing, or even getting in...

Then there was the business of finding a new name. We sat down one day to try to come up with one, thinking that we were going to learn our lesson this time, and that whatever name we came up with wouldn’t be anything even vaguely Nazi-sounding. No way, we thought. No fucking way were we going to make that mistake again.

I’ve always felt very, very strongly that a great vocalist can write great music and doesn’t have to sing it perfectly as long as the emotion’s there.

but what you want in life is strength and belief, and if someone has that, it doesn’t have to be technically perfect.

Sorry I’ve got another girl on the go, love. Here are some defrosting chickens.