Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (12 page)

At Pennine the session went well, apart from sussing out that my
guitar was out of tune and had been the whole time I’d been playing. The neck was warped so it wouldn’t stay in tune. The guitar – my £35 first guitar – was fucked.

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 on stage 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 on stage when your band-mate has to come over and tune your guitar for you.

But anyway, when we were recording the EP, I was greeted with the news that my guitar was out of tune, which immediately ruined it for me because I was shitting myself. But we struggled through. We did ‘No Love Lost’, with Barney going, ‘Ooh, it sounds a bit out, doesn’t it? Hooky’s guitar. . .’ and me getting wound up but having to grit my teeth and let him retune it each time. After that we did ‘Leaders of Men’, ‘Failures’ and ‘Warsaw’, all of them Ian’s songs – I’d pretty much given up on the songwriting by then. I knew when I was beat.

Listening back to the EP, you can really hear how we’d developed – although I’m still amazed how fast we played. Later on in our career I think we ended up playing some of the songs too slowly, funnily enough. Like on
Unknown Pleasures
‘New Dawn Fades’ is too slow, if you ask me, and when I play it live now I speed it up a bit. But back then we were definitely playing like our arses were on fire. Still had that punk thing going on.

Lyrically, I was struck by ‘No Love Lost’, especially the spoken-word verse, an extract from
House of Dolls
(not the last time he found inspiration in that book, of course . . . ). 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. Which he did, he really did. I think you could point to that EP as being the moment that he truly began to find his feet in his writing and singing. All of the experiences he’d had with the band so far, watching other bands at work, reading, getting into Iggy and Throbbing Gristle, it was all coming together for him. It was shaping him into the writer that he became, which was arguably one of the best
lyricists ever. His songs from that point were like having a conversation with a genius, sort of profound and impenetrable at the same time. I think that for a while he found it easy as well. The songs seemed to flow out of him and he didn’t put a foot wrong after that point, didn’t write a single bad lyric after
An Ideal for Living
, right up until his death. Whether we were feeding off him, or whether it was Steve joining or what, I don’t know, but musically we were gelling so well, too. The songs were flooding out of us. Any one of us would be playing and it’d be, ‘Oh, that’s another great riff.’ Ian would either memorize it and go home and come back with some lyrics for it, or he’d pull out scraps of paper from a carrier bag and start adapting them on the spot – and we’d have a song. A good one. I’m not being big-headed; I’m happy to say if a song is bad. I’ve done a few bad songs in my time. But there weren’t any in Joy Division. Even the shit ones were pretty good.

Which was why the session turned out to be so easy: because we had the material, and we were working well together, and we didn’t know enough about the recording process for it to be difficult. All four tracks were played live and the vocals were overdubbed at the end. I think he did them in one take, and then we sang the backing vocals together, me and Ian, and that was it.

I have a feeling it took a day. The engineer did us a mix and sent it off to be pressed. We were too inexperienced to be pains in the arse about it. We didn’t say, ‘Oh, it needs a bit more reverb on the snare drum,’ because we didn’t know enough to ask. God, we must have been so easy to work with.

All we had to do then was wait a couple of weeks for the record, during which time, of course, Barney designed the sleeve. And what did he do? Used a picture of a Hitler Youth member banging a drum.
Yet again
something else that would come back to haunt us. Saying that, I did like the sleeve a lot. He did 1,000 or so of them, printed on pieces of paper that we had to fold into four.

All we needed now were the records. The day they were delivered to the studio I drove to Oldham to pick them up, all 1,000 of them, then sped back as fast as I could to play it. Got home. Rushed upstairs. I was still using the same Dansette, the one I got off Gresty. I’d played all my records on it and now I was going to play
my own
record on it. Excited doesn’t cover it: I was nearly wetting myself. I put on the record to play.

It sounded awful.

I thought,
Oh God, there must be something wrong with this one . . .

So I whipped out another one and it was exactly the same. Got another one out: the same. Really, really quiet, like there was a wad of dust on the needle. I tried and failed with five of them before I gave up and rang Bernard.

‘There’s something wrong with the record,’ I wailed at him. ‘It just sounds fucking shit. It sounds terrible, really muffled and horrible.’

He said, ‘Get on to the guy at Pennine, find out what’s gone wrong.’

I phoned up Paul at Pennine. ‘Hey, man, our record – it sounds shit. It’s all muffled.’

And he went, ‘Oh yes, it will do. You’ve made a mistake there.’

‘What do you mean we’ve made a mistake? What mistake?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘because you’ve put four tracks on the EP, long tracks, the amount of time makes the grooves really narrow, and when the grooves are really narrow, the sound quality’s really bad.’

I was like, ‘Why didn’t you tell us? You’re the fucking engineer; you’re supposed to say, “Don’t put four tracks on, lads, it’ll sound shit – just put two on.”’

He went, ‘Hey, hey, don’t start fucking moaning at me, you dick.’

I said, ‘Don’t you fucking call me a dick. You’re the dick. The fucking record sounds shit, you tosser.’

He hung up. Put the phone down.

Me and Bernard were panicking and I think it was him who suggested that, while the record sounded shit on my old Dansette, it might sound good on a big system. So off we went to Pips Discotheque. When punk got big, Pips had started punk nights alongside the Roxy nights. One of my favourite stories was when Roxy Music were playing at Belle Vue in Manchester and Mr Ferry, hearing about the infamous Roxy/Ferry room, decided to visit after the show, but when he got there the bouncers wouldn’t let him in because he had jeans on. Me and Barney used to go quite a bit. One night they had a competition to win the Sex Pistols album and I won by correctly naming the lead singer. Still got the album at home.

The point was, they sort of knew our faces in Pips so we thought there was a good chance they’d play our EP for us. We handed it over to the DJ Dave Booth and patiently waited to hear it, then watched horrified as it cleared the floor, sounding just as bad as if not worse
than it had on my Dansette. The big system didn’t hide the terrible sound, it just amplified it. He took it off and handed it back.

I felt sick, like you feel when you’ve lost a lot of money. Ian had lied to the bank to pay for 1,000 singles that were virtually unplayable, and there was no question of dumping them because he needed to get the money back. We had to sell them. Going round to Steve’s one night we found ourselves putting the vinyl into Barney’s sleeves, knowing that we had to go out and flog a terrible-sounding record that would probably do us more harm than good. Knowing that people were going to buy it and not realize it was shit till they got home.

We were so demoralized that we barely even noticed how posh Steve’s house was. He had a koi-carp pond in his drive and not one but
two
inside toilets, as well as central heating. Any other time we would have been ripping into him about it, but all we could do was sit there pushing the records into sleeves, putting the sleeves into plastic bags, having to be very quiet because his dad was having a nap. Steve’s mum and dad were proper parents, like off the telly. I remember one night he had a cold so his mum locked away his drum kit to stop him coming to rehearsal. Of course he arrived anyway and ended up having to use Terry’s kit, which kept falling apart as he was playing. He was forever stopping to put it back together again. Good practice for working with Martin, that was.

Anyway, we were sitting in his house, being dead quiet so as not to wake his dad, putting the crap record together. 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 length for good-sounding audio on a seven-inch single. If you go above that the audio quality gets progressively worse until you end up with a record that sounds like ours did, which had more than six minutes on each side.

Faced with no other choice, we soldiered on and tried to sell it. Debbie was going to chop Ian’s bollocks off if we didn’t recoup the
money so we lugged it from shop to shop trying to offload it as quickly as we could before word spread about the abysmal sound. Knowing that promoters hardly ever played the tapes and records they were given, we used to leave it with them as a calling card, hoping that at least they’d be impressed with the sleeve. Our Nazi sleeve. Knowing that if they ever got round to playing it it would do us no good at all.

In the end we were just giving them away, and weeks after delivery we still had hundreds left over. God knows what became of them – they’re worth a mint now, of course. The
An Ideal for Living
EP is probably our most bootlegged item. I get kids coming up to me with a twelve-inch version with the seven-inch sleeve, swearing it’s the genuine article.

‘No, mate, never came out as a twelve-inch, not with that sleeve,’ I tell them. ‘Believe me, I wish it had.’

If they still want me to sign it, I write: ‘This is a bootleg. Love, Peter Hook.’

In between recording the EP and Barney doing the sleeve we decided to change our name.

We were still sharing managerial duties at that time. When it was my turn I used to sit at work with the
NME
, going through the live listings and phoning up trying to get a gig – like, ‘Hello, is that the Elephant & Castle? We’re a band from Manchester and we’re looking for a gig.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Warsaw.’

‘Warsaw Pakt? Oh yeah, I’ve heard of you . . .’

‘No, just Warsaw.’

They’d go. ‘Oh? Just Warsaw? Not Warsaw Pakt? Oh, right, not interested, mate . . .’

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. This was very puzzling. Not long after there was a big piece about them in the
NME
, in which it sounded like they were a pretty shit punk band but with a good gimmick: they’d made an album direct to disc. I think they’d recorded it in one take in a cutting plant, the idea being to cut out the tape stage or stick it to the man or something. I don’t know. Who cared? All I knew was, they were stopping us getting gigs.

Warsaw Pakt had links with Pink Fairies and Motörhead, and their album, Needle Time, was notable for being recorded direct to acetate at Trident Studios, released within twenty-four hours and then deleted after a week. Despite the publicity, the band split up shortly afterwards – but as far as the Manchester-based Warsaw were concerned the damage had already been done.

Even though we’d been using the name Warsaw for longer, they’d effectively taken it over. During the usual band meeting in the pub we decided to change ours, and so began the long conversations about
what we should be instead. Obviously Ian had read
House of Dolls
. H e’d already pilfered it for the spoken-word bit on ‘No Love Lost’, and now he took Joy Division from it too – and thank God he did, because he saved us from the shame of being called Boys of Bondage or Slaves of Venus. Barney went off and started doing interesting typographical things to it. He gave it Germanic lettering for the
An Ideal for Living
EP, and an exclamation mark. And that was it, we were Joy Division.

Now, of course, it’s a full-time job trying to safeguard the name. 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. I rang the guy up. I do that when I see people ripping us off: bootleggers, photographers, you name it. Normally they back down, meek as kittens. I get them to make a donation to the NSPCC, send me the receipt along with a T-shirt or whatever, and we part on good terms. But this guy wasn’t having it. We ended up having a full-scale row and before I slammed the phone down I told him exactly where he could stick his vibrators. He’s still selling them now as far as I know. Wanker.

Quite funny, really: I remember having an argument with Barry White about bootlegging. What he construed as bootlegging was someone copying his LP, selling it and not paying him royalties, whereas I thought bootlegging as somebody recording you live and putting it out as a live L P. 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.