Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (13 page)

I suppose it all goes back to when we were investigated by the taxman because of the Haçienda and foolishly we went to meet them. You don’t have to go, but our accountant let us. It wasn’t a great meeting. The taxman tore us apart. Rob was shaking. One thing that did come out in the meeting was them saying, ‘We’ve looked through all your accounts and can’t see any receipt of monies for Joy Division T-shirts. Why is that?’

We went to great lengths to explain ourselves: how we didn’t believe in self-promotion; we didn’t believe in ripping off our fans; we didn’t do merchandise because we thought it was blatant profiteering, the work of the devil, etc., etc. He listened patiently then said, ‘How come wherever I go I see Joy Division T-shirts, then?’

We were stumped, struck dumb, and after what seemed like an eternity he said, ‘I don’t believe you and I’m fining you accordingly.’

The only band ever to get fined for not doing their own T-shirts. £20,000. Bang!

Anyway, after the name change, of course, the Nazi shit hit the fan. Changing our name to Joy Division, calling the EP
An Ideal for Living
and having a picture of a Hitler Youth banging a drum on the front of it – well, looking at it now, I can see the problem. I mean,
An Ideal for Living
? It even sounds Nazi. Not to mention the way we dressed and Barney shouting out about Rudolf Hess on the
Short Circuit
record. Let’s face it, there was quite a lot of evidence against us.

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. We’d grown up with bomb craters behind our houses. It was the time of the big epic war films like
A Bridge Too Far
, and of
Warlord
and
Commando
comics. Little kids played with toy soldiers and big kids read Sven Hassell books. Everybody was fixated on the war and punks, being punks, focused on the most unpalatable, shocking side of it. This started with the Pistols, who often had swastikas on their clothes.

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. Yes, we were naïve and stupid and probably trying too hard to get up the noses of the older generation, but we weren’t Nazis. Never have been and never will be.

Rock Against Racism had been formed in August 1976, in the wake of Eric Clapton’s drunken comments supporting the National Front and a resurgence of interest in the far-right. The Anti-Nazi League was another organization formed in opposition, and would go on to organize awareness-raising concerts featuring the Buzzcocks among many others. Thus Joy Division’s flirtation with Nazi imagery went very much against the political tide, and the band not only found themselves asked about it during many interviews but also began to lose local popularity. The Nazi imagery would turn off Tosh Ryan at Rabid Records, as well as Bob Last at Fast Product, both of whom passed on Joy Division, and in June
Sounds
reviewed the
An Ideal for Living
EP with the headline ‘Another Fascism for Fun and Profit Mob’.

It followed us around for years. Me and Steve did an interview on French TV in 2004 and the first question was, ‘Why did you glorify Nazism with the name Joy Division?’

We thought, ‘Fucking hell, mate, you’re talking about twenty-six
years
ago.’

All of that was yet to come, of course, and in the meantime we tried to put the shit-record fiasco behind us and concentrate on rehearsing and writing songs. 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.

Having said that, Ian, who was by now our driving force, did go through a period of being unhappy with Bernard, and called a group meeting when he was on holiday. According to Ian, Barney wasn’t playing enough rhythm guitar – it was all lead stuff – and the group was suffering. Ian wanted that Iggy Pop wall of sound, whereas Barney was into the lightness and separation like the Velvet Underground. Though at the time we all agreed to get another rhythm guitarist in, at some point we must have come to our senses and realized that the band wasn’t just about any one instrument, it was about all of us, and if we messed with that formula it was fucked. Thank God we did. 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 makes Joy Division special.

Anyway, it was me who ended up providing the rhythm guitar, because it was around then that I started playing high on the bass, all because of a new speaker I’d bought. I already had my Sound City amp (for which my mother, bless her, had taken a loan from A1 on Oxford Road) but I still needed a speaker. Every night I read the ‘Articles for Sale: Musical Instruments’ column in the
MEN
, and finally came across an advert for ‘Bass Speaker £10’ with a phone number. So I thought,
Great, it’s in Salford
, and phoned up to say I was interested in it. ‘What kind of speaker is it, mate?’

He went, ‘Oh, it’s a Celestion eighteen, two hundred watt.’

I didn’t know what he was on about, so I said, ‘Sounds good, I’ll have it. I’m on my way now.’ Drove up there, knocked, and my old art teacher opened the door.

‘Oh, all right, sir, Mr Hubbard, sir?’ I said.

‘Peter, how are you? And you don’t have to call me “sir”.’ And he invited me in.

‘I didn’t know you were a bass player, sir,’ I said. Funny habit that; I still call him “sir” now.

‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘I’m the bassist with the Salford Jets.’ They were a very well known band in Salford and Manchester – the first band I ever saw live, funnily enough, as Smiffy in their glam-rock phase at the Willows. Mike Sweeney, the lead singer, is a lovely guy. Anyway, I couldn’t try it. He said it sounded great with his set-up so I gave him the £10, got home, wired it up to my Sound City amp and it sounded dreadful, absolutely fucking awful. When I played a low note it farted. It made me feel physically ill to hear it. For a while I struggled with it, playing my farty low notes, but it was just awful. 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. We developed it in our new practice room at T. J. Davidson’s. TJ’s really became
our
place; we were one of the first bands in and nearly every other band in Manchester followed suit. We stayed there right up until the end of the group. It was where a lot of the famous Joy Division photographs were taken. Also where the ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ video was shot. An old, disused mill on Little Peter Street, it was split into many rooms with a band taking each one. Sad Café were in there; the Buzzcocks too. It had a great vibe – just right for our music – because everything had been ripped out then left. There was empty shelving everywhere, exposed pipes; the floorboards were filthy and covered in cigarette butts and there was even an old mattress at one end of our room.

When we first got in there it was great because the boiler was working so it was dead warm and, like all the other bands, we’d come in and gone, ‘Oh, this is brilliant. We’ll take a room for three weeks – no, a month.’ But then the oil in the boiler ran out and was never refilled, and from then on it was absolutely freezing. We had to buy a little heater from a second-hand shop; Ian used to sit on it all the time but it gave him piles because his arse was dead warm but the rest of him was freezing. The rest of us could never get near it, of course, because we were playing, so he hogged it – and paid for his selfishness in piles.

We used a storeroom in TJ’s, too, which was decorated with cans of our piss because the toilet was miles away so we used to piss in empty
cans then stack them on the shelves, where they were always getting knocked over. Very funny, that was, when some poor unsuspecting bastard knocked over our cans of piss. We shared the storeroom with a band called the Inadequates, Gillian’s band – Gillian Gilbert, of course, who later joined New Order and ended up marrying Steve – and we occasionally ‘borrowed’ their PA, like the night we played at the Oldham Tower Club.

It’s a gig that never appears on any listings in books or on websites, but I’ll never forget it. Sad Café had played there the month before and sold it out, which sounded encouraging to us. Plus we were getting thirty quid for the gig, which wasn’t bad at all. So we borrowed the Inadequates’ PA, got it to Oldham, had a good look round the venue, liked it, sound-checked, all the time really looking forward to the gig, thinking it was going to be a great night.

Nobody came. Not a soul. By ten o’clock there was still no one in, not even bar staff, only the manager, an old black guy, who said to us, ‘You’ve got to go on. You’ve got to go on now. You’ve got to play.’

‘But there’s nobody here.’

‘Well, tough. If you want the money, you’ve got to play.’

Whether he was taking the piss or not, I don’t know, but after our third song he started sweeping up, and when the next song finished, said, ‘Do you guys know any Hendrix?’

Ian said, ‘No, mate. Sorry, mate.’

‘Oh, shame, man. Shame,’ he said, shaking his head.

We played our next song. Finished that.

‘Are you sure you don’t know any Hendrix?’ he said.

‘No, mate. Sorry, mate.’

‘Oh, shame, man. Shame.’

So, anyway, we got about halfway through the set when these two punk girls came in, quite attractive girls, and we bucked up a bit. Wahey. Couple of fit girls in. Played another tune, finished, and one of the girls went, ‘Hey?’

Ian went, ‘What?’

‘Are you the Frantic Elevators?’

The Frantic Elevators.
Fucking Mick Hucknall’s band
.

Ian said, ‘No. We are not the Frantic Elevators. We’re Joy Division.’

She turned to her mate and said, ‘See? I told you we was in the wrong club,’ and they both left. That was it. We played the last three
songs to an empty room, finished, packed the gear up, got our £30 off the guy and went home.

Because of that, the way I’ve always been is: if there’s anybody there at all, I’ll do the gig. I’ve had none at Oldham Tower club and 125,000 at Glastonbury, and with anything in between I’m happy. I accepted this DJing gig at Reading a while ago, but in the meantime got offered a mini-tour in Greece, which would have paid really well, so I phoned the promoter in Reading and said, ‘Look, I’ve been offered this tour but it clashes. Is there any way of postponing the gig?’

He was like, ‘Oh, sorry, Hooky, I can’t. It’s been advertised and everything. There’s been loads of interest, lots of people coming.’

Grr.

So I blew out the Greek tour, drove down, got to my hotel, which turned out to be a B&B, and when I tried to talk to the promoter about what time he wanted me at the club, he was being really cagey. First of all, I’d have to play for only half an hour, he said.

‘Well that’s not very long, mate,’ I said. ‘I could do with a bit more time. It’s already half-eight. What time do you open?’

And then he starts umming and ahhing and swerving the question.

Until in the end I almost lost it with him: ‘Look, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?’

‘I’ve got a confession to make, Hooky.’

‘What?’

‘There’s no one here,’ he said, ‘but I’ll pay you anyway, mate; I’ll pay you anyway.’

I said, ‘Look, it’s only half-eight. Why don’t we give it a bit longer and see if anybody turns up?’

So we drove down to the club, and I cooled my heels in the car park while he went in and checked. Then he reappeared looking shamefaced. ‘No one in there. Look, I’ll give you the money and take you back to the B&B.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘So there’s nobody there? No one? Not a soul?’

‘Well, no, there’s about eight people.’

‘Well, fuck it,’ I said. ‘If there’s eight people there, we’ll do it. At least the eight people have had the decency to come out. Let’s go.’

Lo and behold, we went and did it and I had the eight of them on stage with me, playing the tunes, dancing round. They were all New Order fans and it was brilliant, a really, really, good night.

‘Wow,’ the promoter said, ‘I can’t believe it. I wouldn’t have thought you would have done it.’

‘Listen, mate,’ I said, ‘I’ve played for no one before. Anything more than that is a bonus.’

Anyway – back in 1977 and at least things were looking up for our next gig, which was a New Year’s Eve party at the Swinging Apple in Liverpool. I took the seats out of my Mark 10 Jag to get the Inadequates’ (again, ‘borrowed’) PA in and take it to Liverpool, where we discovered that the Swinging Apple wasn’t really a venue so much as a club; but for some reason they’d decided to put a band on as a special New Year’s thing, and we were that band. But it was brilliant, actually. Everybody was dancing all night and we were in a fantastic mood, firstly because gigs had been a bit hard to come by during that period and we were pleased to at least be playing, and secondly because we’d been given a crate of beer. I was driving, as I always was back then, but still.
A crate of beer
. We got paid a lot of money for the gig, too – about sixty quid, if I remember correctly. I even think we played our set twice.

So it was a good end to what had been an eventful year. We’d got the band going, found a drummer and begun to really nail our style. Even so, we were waiting for something to happen. And we felt that something
needed
to happen. Something big.