Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (24 page)

Why didn’t he announce it? I don’t know. A mixture of things, I suppose. A desire to keep band and family separate, which was always Rob’s philosophy, and a sign of the times, when men didn’t go dotty about their kids like we do now. All wrong, of course, and it must have made things more difficult for him having to keep wife, kid,
and
the group all happy. Trying to follow his dreams at the same time. With the benefit of hindsight you can see how damaging it would have been and I’m pleased to say that I’ve learned from it: since New Order’s split in 1993 I’ve always gone out of my way to make sure that family and friends of all the band members aren’t excluded but very much
in
cluded.

Great thing, isn’t it, hindsight?

In July we went to Central Sound Studios in Manchester for the first of the ‘Transmission’ sessions. The tunes were pouring out thick and fast. ‘Atmosphere’, ‘Dead Souls’ and ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ all came during this period. I think if it hadn’t been for the great reception at the Mayflower we wouldn’t have bothered with ‘Transmission’ as a single, to be honest. But the Mayflower had been the first of a series of occasions where ‘Transmission’ had blown people away live. We’d begun to think maybe we had something a bit special on our hands – so special we should leave it off the album and release it as a single.

It’s one of our songs that should have been a hit – and probably would have been if we’d been on a major, or even if Factory had done
things differently. If we’d done things the way normal groups do them, in other words, and released ‘Digital’ as a single, which would have been big. Then ‘Disorder’ should have been a single and that would have been bigger. By then we’d have had the kind of foundations we needed to make ‘Transmission’ a monster, and by the time we got to ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ we’d have been ready to take over the world.

But we didn’t do it the normal way, of course. We did it the Factory way.

Not that I’d change anything, mind you. I’d stop Ian 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 moulded 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.

So the first session for the ‘Transmission’ single was at Central Sound Studios, right next to the Odeon in the centre of Manchester and right next to the best kebab shop in town. We got the shock of our lives when we realized where the studio was. We’d been going to that kebab shop for years, never knowing that there was a recording studio next door. What a bonus. The kebab shop, I mean.

It was a cheaper studio, not like Strawberry, but was good for demoing the songs before we went to record them properly. We did ‘Transmission’, obviously, and it was a good run-through. Plus ‘Novelty’, despite the fact that it was one of our really early, raw ones, one that I’d written, actually, that Ian had been generous enough to take and mould and make into a song. But for whatever reason Rob really liked it, so we just agreed and recorded it. Badgered into it, probably, because comparing it to the others it sounds very young – a young song from
a young band learning their craft. ‘Something Must Break’ was left off the single because there was no room and Rob didn’t want to compromise the sound quality of ‘Novelty’ because he loved it so much. It was an interesting song for us, though, being the first time the band had used a synthesizer. Martin had used them, of course, but the thing about us in Joy Division – especially me, Bernard and Steve – was that we were sponges constantly learning off Martin. So you’d have this situation where on
Unknown Pleasures
me and Barney were moaning about Martin using a synth, then a couple of sessions down the line we were using it ourselves. Bernard would embrace all that more than me, and on ‘Something Must Break’ he used a synthesizer instead of the guitar; there’s no guitar on it. It’s the same technique we used to write ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, actually. There was no guitar on that when we first wrote it, just Bernard playing the synth, me on bass, Steve on drums and Ian’s vocals. Even live when we used to play it there was no guitar on it, which gave it a different, unusual sound. It was still a fantastic song and the melody was a great one. Later, when Ian mastered the guitar a little, he played on both.

With
Unknown Pleasures
out and ‘Transmission’ in the can, it really felt like we were taking off: drawing ahead of the competition a bit. That meant we had to do more interviews, of course, which was a downside. But, again, the fact that we were on an independent meant that we could be awkward bastards if we wanted to be. In fact Tony and Rob encouraged us to be – and, believe me, we did want to be awkward bastards. I mean, we’d all been reading the
NME
and
Melody Maker
for years but, being the kind of contrary types that we were, rather than embrace the music press we kicked against it. 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. Amazing that the
NME
and
Melody Maker
got away with it week after week, because most people said the same thing. Then there was the fact that people kept bringing up the Nazi thing. Once we’d answered that but kept being asked about it, and once it had been made plain that the band didn’t have Nazi sympathies but people still went on about it, well, it was bound to piss us off. 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.’

Afterwards 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 and one of those things that got us remembered, that suited us fine. We were lucky. We had the luxury of being awkward because we were coming out with great music. We didn’t really care if we pissed off any journalist. The way we looked at them was,
Where were you when we were playing to an empty room?
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?

What was good about our rise was that we were well managed by Rob, who kept our feet on the ground, kept us level-headed and focused on the music; because, even when we had
Unknown Pleasures
out and the
NME
was saying it was brilliant, and we had ‘Transmission’ coming out and a buzz around us, gigs coming out of our ears, he kept our feet firmly on the ground. 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. Even when we went to London to record
Closer
we stayed in a quite scruffy pair of flats with £1.50 per diem: you could spend how you wished, dinner or a couple of pints but not both. We didn’t yet have any money from the record. (Publishing, as in who wrote what in the songs, brings nearly all bands down. I remember the immortal quote from the 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.)

There was one memorable occasion with Ian putting a drum case on his head and marching round TJ’s, screaming at Rob about money, so maybe we had the odd fall-out, but nothing major. The gigs we were doing weren’t big payers anyway. We just kept on doing our thing, which was playing, recording, winding up journalists, and in late July appearing on Granada TV’s
What’s On
.

Now that was excellent and we were very excited to do it – even more so when we went to the subsidized canteen and found it full of Roman soldiers. Rob was following me and Twinny going, ‘Don’t you nick anything. Don’t you fucking nick anything, you pair of bastards.’

In those days Granada was very unionized. It was a very old-fashioned union; you had to be a member to work there. It was very powerful. You had to adhere to very strict rules. When we came to set up there was a light that somebody had taken down from the ceiling and put in the middle of the stage, and we said to the sound guys, ‘Do you mind if we move this light, mate?’

They all shook their heads. ‘Oh, don’t touch that; that’s Lighting. We’re Sound. They’re Camera. That’s Lighting. You can’t touch that.’

‘Okay, but we need to move it, mate, to play.’

‘You can’t touch it.’

We were like, ‘You what? What are you talking about? We’ve got to have a sound-check.’

They were going, ‘No, don’t touch it.’

They stuck tape around it to mark it out of bounds.

Our mouths were hanging open. ‘We can’t sound-check.’

‘You’ll just have to wait.’

Rob wasn’t having that. He went to grab at the light and one of the guys started shouting at him, ‘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.’

Rob was in his face. ‘You fucking what, mate?’ but they weren’t budging. Someone called Lighting, who said they’d send someone over, and we all looked at each other in disbelief then sat around to wait, Rob with steam coming out of his ears. Finally, an hour-and-a-half later, this Lighting guy ambled into the studio and picked up the light – ‘Sorry about that; must have left it there when I did
Granada Reports
’ – and buggered off again.

Brilliant. We leapt up ready to sound-check –
at last
– only to watch gobsmacked as the lot of them turned on their heels and marched out. Not on strike, thank fuck for small mercies, but to have dinner. By the time they returned it was to tap their watches and say, ‘Right, you’ve got half an hour to film it. Better get a move on, lads . . .’

They were rewarded with a slightly nervy and shell-shocked performance of ‘She’s Lost Control’ that was broadcast over the end credits of
What’s On
. Best thing was that I was wearing the blue shirt that I’d worn on Tony’s programme. Very, very fond of that shirt, I was, right up until it got ripped when we were playing with Dexy’s Midnight Runners.

Talking of Mick Hucknall (which we weren’t) his band the Frantic Elevators used to practise in T. J. Davidson’s. They also put music out on his label, T. J. M. Records. Come to think of it, he was the butt of a few of our japes, too, as were a lot of the bands in there. I think we reached our peak with the stinky toilet we found loose somewhere, tied a rope to and lowered gently from our window on the top floor, swinging it to and fro until it crashed right through into V2’s rehearsal room. When the Buzzcocks’ tour came along, Rob treated us to brand-new flight cases courtesy of Bulldog Cases in London, and we terrorized the whole place, locking people in the cases – usually one of a young bunch of fans from Chorley, led by our soon-to-be-roadie Rex Sargeant, who used to hang round watching us practise. We’d push them down the stairs, over and over again. It was a good testing ground. Sometimes Ian would have a ride but only with Barney’s crash helmet and gloves on because he was allergic to foam. We used to take him for a spin round the car park too.

We liked Tony Davidson, actually. We asked him to be our manager before Rob came on the scene and he turned us down. He already managed the Distractions, V2, the Frantic Elevators – nearly all of the people who used his rehearsal rooms – but he passed on Joy Division; I don’t think he got the music. 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 start 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: Ian had been doing his dance virtually since the beginning; the music was always there. Maybe we had a bit more swagger about us now – speaking for myself: yeah, definitely, of course – but otherwise the look hadn’t changed. 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. After our next gig, which was at the YMCA Tottenham Court Road, the guy from the
NME
wrote that we were ‘un-cramped by commercial pressure’ and he hit the nail on the head. Thanks to Tony and Rob there was no pressure: no pressure to promote, to sell, to kiss the right arse. The only condition was to keep on writing great songs. We were more than happy to oblige. Had we gone down a different route there definitely would have been that pressure. Like I say, the Banshees had it; the Psychedelic Furs, the Cure, they all had it. We didn’t.