Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (2 page)

No worries
, I thought.
The rest of them’ll sort that out.
Sure enough, a load more of the Flemish Weaver mob waded in to split them up. But then more punches were thrown, one of them went crashing to the floor and instead of the fight stopping it got worse, gradually escalating until
all
of my mates were involved, a huge mass punch-up. Like a giant ball of them rolling up and down in front of us as we were playing. Oh my God! The rest of the band were looking at them and then at me and giving me daggers as this big ball of fighting blokes rolled across the front of us and then back again. Of course the bouncer who’d thrown Ian out was nowhere to be seen, and they were just left to roll about, so we just kept on playing. Flat as fuck but the band played on.

But then it escalated. These other kids kept running forward from the back, starting on my mates, lashing out at them as they rolled past. Which of course wound me up. So I started kicking these kids from the stage.

‘Don’t fucking kick my mate, y’bastard!’

‘Hey, la, pack it in!’

‘Bleedin’ Scousers!’

So there I was, kicking them in the head, trying to play ‘Exercise One’ while trying to hold my string in, the rest of the band really pissed off with me for bringing along my daft scally mates.
Shit
!

At last the bouncer reappeared. He had a bunch of mates with him and they started knocking heads together, kicked out the Flemish Weaver lot and then the Scousers, which left us finishing the gig to an
empty room, me holding my string, Ian, Barney and Steve all looking at me like they wanted to throttle me. It was terrible, absolutely fucking awful. Our first gig as Joy Division and we didn’t play another one for almost two months, which back then seemed like a long, long time. Definitely the worst thing in the world.

Like I say. Little did we know, eh?

I was born at about four o’clock in the afternoon at Hope Hospital, Salford on13 February 1956 – and no, not Friday the thirteenth; it was a Monday.

Mum: Irene Acton. She was stubborn, obstinate, had a will of iron. A typical Northern mum, in other words. Dad: John (Jack) Woodhead. He was a driver for Frederick Hampson Glassworks in Salford, whose building was one of the few left standing when the council demolished Salford and rebuilt it from scratch in the seventies. I still drive past it all the time.

My first memory is of being in a pram on the pier at Blackpool with someone feeding me chips; I think it was my Auntie Jean. Not long after that my mum and dad split up and got divorced, the paperwork citing ‘cruelty to the petitioner’ – my mother. He was beating her up, of course. It was standard Salford practice for men to get pissed and knock their wives about in those days. But the final straw was when he started seeing this other woman. My mum hated him for that. She hated him till the day she died. Even though she met Bill, married him and was with him for forty years –
forty years
– she hated my father’s guts, even after he died. Wouldn’t hear his name mentioned. That’s the kind of woman she was.

After they split up, me, Mum and my younger brother, Chris, went to live with our gran; and, once my mum finished paying for the front-room carpet in the old house because she couldn’t trust Jack to pay (she didn’t want the money-lenders to think she was unreliable – she was very proud), we were for a while a pretty normal single-parent working-class family: two-up, two-down, outside toilet, coal hole, living in Jane Street, Langworthy, in wonderful, dirty old Salford. When I saw
Control
, all those years later, I didn’t even notice it was in black and white because it was exactly what my childhood had looked and felt like: dark and smoggy and brown, the colour of a wet cardboard box, which was how all of Manchester looked in those days.

There was nothing to do for us kids, apart from mooch around
kicking a tin or poking a lolly stick into a bit of hot tar. The whole of Salford was our playground: we were let out in the morning and told to be back for tea. I remember getting lost and being brought home by the coppers a couple of times. The first time we seemed to have toys was the Christmas Bill came along, when I would have been five. He was courting my mum so of course he inundated me and our Chris with gifts. I remember coming down on Christmas morning, and the presents – I’d never seen anything like it in my life: he’d bought me and our kid a pedal car each and loads more besides. He spoilt us rotten that Christmas, for the first and last time. After that it was back to an orange and a few nuts.

Bill was Ernest William Hook. I thought he was single when he met my mum but I found out years later that he’d been married before and had kids, two daughters, of his own. I only found out one afternoon after a match: United, of course. I used to get a programme then take it to Bill’s dad, Granddad Hook, a lovely old bloke who used to have a second-hand clothes stall on Salford Market with his wife. She’d died and he now lived on the Precinct after the slum clearance. There was a picture of two young girls on his sideboard. Innocently I asked . . .

‘Who are they, Granddad?’

‘Your dad’s other family,’ he replied. It still seems strange they were never mentioned.

In the beginning, when he was courting my mum, Bill was really nice. Me and our kid once poured a cup of tea in his petrol tank one afternoon (jealous, I suppose, because we were used to having Mum to ourselves) and he didn’t even batter us! Just told us off. But over the years his hidden/ignored family made more sense, because he soon became a bit of a misery. He could be a real horrible fucker sometimes, especially at Christmas. His catchphrase used to be, ‘If I’m suffering we’re all suffering’ – and he meant it. I still use it now to wind my kids up.

His saving grace was his money, I suppose. He was a highly skilled glass fitter. You know those machines they use for blowing glass, to make bottles and jars and all that? His job was to fix them and he went all over the world to do it: Singapore, India, the Caribbean – he was a proper seasoned traveller and the only guy on our street with a car, a 2.5 Riley RMB four-door that me and our kid put the tea in. He got us a telly, too, which again was the only one on our street. People used
to queue up to watch it; we were suddenly popular. That’s another of my earliest memories: me and Chris, after we’d been put to bed, creeping out and sitting at the top of the stairs listening to
Coronation Street
.

I was enrolled at Stowell Memorial School and loved it. I was happy. Mum and Bill got married – we stayed at home with Granny that day – and not long after that it was announced that he’d been offered a new job. So we were moving. The job was with Jamaica Glassworks and that’s where we were going: we were moving to Jamaica.

In 1962, this was. Bill went on ahead, and a few days later me, Mum, Chris and all our worldly goods travelled down to Southampton, me clinging on to a plastic bag of toy soldiers. There was a very big storm and because of the bad weather we had to get a tug out to the boat. We were all petrified by the size of waves, the noise of the engines and the sailors bawling at us as they hauled us aboard the ship. Then when it came to my turn the plastic bag tore and my soldiers all spilt out into the stormy sea, leaving me holding the tattered bag.

Then there was the crossing. Oh my God.

You have to bear in mind that my mother, right up until the day she died, was the most conservative eater imaginable. She could hardly bear to eat anything that came from south of Salford. So when we ended up on an Italian cruise liner going to Jamaica she was freaked out because there was only one thing she could eat, which meant there was only one thing me and our kid could eat, too: chicken and chips. I still love chicken and chips now, funnily enough – dry, with a bit of salt and lots of pepper – but God only knows why because it never fails to remind me of being on that ship. For seventeen days that’s all we had: chicken and chips. At the kids’ dinner we’d watch the ice statues being carved and the huge cakes being laid out for the adult sitting later, but my mum said we couldn’t have any cake because they were dirty.

Our Chris was only three. He was a screamer, not a sleeper, and it felt like he screamed all the way to the West Indies. This made us very unpopular – especially in the afternoons, when everyone was trying to snooze on deck. On top of that we were all seasick and hardly came out of the cabin (apart from one notable exception when, running down the corridor, I fell and smashed my nose, blood everywhere). We stopped at some fantastic places, though: Bilbao, Madeira, the Canary Islands and Trinidad. But still we never ate, and always made it back on board for the old chicken and chips. The journey seemed to take
forever, but – apart from Chris nearly falling overboard as we docked because he’d seen Bill on the dockside – we arrived safely.

Our accommodation in Jamaica was a rented detached bungalow: three bedrooms and an inside toilet – the first place I ever lived with an inside toilet. All marble floors. One day these two black guys came to the door and asked if they could milk our calabash tree, and in return they’d make maracas for me and our kid. Proper maracas are made out of the fruit of a calabash tree – they empty out the middle bit, put stones inside and there you go. So Mum was like, ‘Yeah whatever,’ and these guys tore into the tree, threw down all the fruit, made us two pairs of maracas – one for me and one for our kid – and fucked off.

Later, all hell broke loose. The tree must have been full of spiders and that night the house was overrun with them, fucking hundreds of them, all over. They were huge, and I bet they were poisonous too. Man eaters, definitely. Bill was racing round killing them while me, Mum and our kid stood on the table screaming. We then beat a retreat to the bedroom, where Bill used a shoe to whack the spiders scuttling under the door as we all stood there wailing. I’m not joking! It was like a horror film
.
I’m getting the heebie-jeebies now just thinking about it. Hate spiders still – no
I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!
for me (although I did get asked to audition last year, funnily enough).

Not long after that we moved to 31 Phoenix Avenue, Kingston, which was also a detached bungalow, with fantastic, beautiful grounds where pineapples grew. It too had an inside toilet, and more beautiful marble floors – it even came with staff. We were sent to a private school, Surbiton Preparatory, which was terrifying. The teachers would scream at us to do joined-up writing and spell, which at six you didn’t do in Salford. But we soon settled in and as a great bonus it was too hot in the afternoons to work so school finished at 2.30pm. All in all it should have been pretty idyllic, except that things had started to get a bit shit around that time: firstly between my mum and Bill and secondly in Jamaica, where the locals had got fed up with the Chinese and whites running all the businesses and had started to turf them out – literally storming into shops, chucking out the owners and taking over. At the same time a lot of houses were getting robbed, people were being mugged in the street and there were riots not far from where we lived in Kingston so there was a dangerous air about the place. You’d be on
the street watching the cops beat the shit out of the thieves, chasing them down, and when they caught them sitting on them and giving them a good pistol-whipping.

Bill stopped coming home. He was spending a lot of time drinking in the club at the glassworks after his shifts. He was a twat to us but a great friend to everyone else, and one of the only white guys at work who mixed with the black guys. He’d go out drinking with the white guys then carry on with the black guys and reckoned that was why ours was the only house on our street that was never robbed. At night my mum would sit on the veranda with a crate of Red Stripe, waiting for him to come home, getting drunker and angrier, and when he eventually arrived back they’d have a screaming row. Me and our kid would cower behind the sofa, praying for him to die, while they charged around the house screaming at each other and smashing the place to smithereens. He’d beat her up; she’d attack him with her high heel, giving as good as she got; and by the time they’d finished the house would look like a bomb had hit it. The next morning the maid would put it all back together again, so it was nice and tidy for the next fight.

You can’t have everything, though. Mum and Bill knocking lumps out of each other was a small price to pay for the fantastic weather, posh house, car and money. Plus Mum worked for the Jamaica Tourist Board, so we used to get free tickets to all the resorts and hang around in country clubs. You know how I said that life had been black and white in Salford? Well in Jamaica it was definitely in colour.

So what did we do? We returned to Salford.

She was homesick, Mum. That was the problem. She hated the food and she missed her mother and sister. So when Bill’s contract came up for renewal she persuaded him to move back to Salford, which must have caused some mega-arguments, because of course he wanted to stay on in Jamaica. There were rumours about an American woman. I remember one night my mum drunkenly pushing me into our blue Ford Prefect and setting off, bread knife in hand, to kill them both. Trouble was, she couldn’t drive – and I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to learn to drive while holding a bread knife in one hand and a cigarette in the other, but it’s pretty difficult. Luckily, after hopping through a couple of intersections, she thought better of it and hopped us home. I always wonder why she never took our Chris, lucky bugger.