Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (3 page)

When it came to moving she got her own way, though, (and, knowing my mum, I don’t expect that outcome was ever in doubt) and Bill gave in, probably thinking he’d be able to find a good job back in Manchester. There were a lot of glassworks around and at least they’d saved up enough from working in Jamaica so we were well-off financially.

Or we would have been, but for the fact that on the day we were due to fly home (first time on a plane for me) we were paid a visit by a couple of cops and a ‘tax inspector’ who claimed that Bill had ‘mis-paid’ his taxes. They knew he had the money – he’d drawn it out of the bank to return home – and they weren’t going to let us leave until he paid them. These guys basically screwed all of Bill’s savings out of him, and we came home with nothing.

This was the summer of 1966. I was ten. Everyone else was going mad about England winning the World Cup as we returned from Jamaica, where we’d been for nearly four years, in our posh house with its marble floors, inside toilet and maids, to a two-up, two-down in Salford with an outside toilet and a very unhappy stepdad who never got another job in glass again and who got more and more bitter about it as the years went on.

We moved to back to Granny’s for a while but soon went to Ordsall, just down the road, to 32 Rothwell Street, right by the park passage. They paid £300 or so for it. I went to Regent Road Primary, a mixed school, where my Auntie Jean was a dinner lady, which was great, because not only did I get tons of blancmange but also I’d returned from Jamaica as a bit of an outsider and needed all the allies I could get. In Jamaica the kids were much more advanced than I was, and I’d had to catch up. That meant that I’d returned miles ahead of the other kids back here in Salford. Now I was given a bollocking for doing joined-up writing. It was great: I could really take it easy. I had quite a good time at Regent Road. Again all of Salford was my playground and, apart from a few jibes about my big nose and a crippling shyness with girls, I was quite well behaved and enjoyed myself.

I’m sure that was the reason I passed the Eleven Plus – because I was so well educated compared to the other kids – and in those days you had to be bright to get into grammar school. The way it went back then was that if you failed the Eleven Plus you went to the secondary school, which was where the thickos went, or to the technical college
if you were borderline, or the grammar if you were bright. There was no way in hell a thick bastard like me would have got in without an advantage.

I went to Salford Grammar School. This was where I met Barney Dickin (to become Sumner). Eventually we would start Joy Division together, and then New Order. So I’ve got Jamaica to thank for a lifelong love of chicken and chips and a lifelong fear of spiders – but also, in a funny kind of way, for all of that too. How different things could have been if I’d stayed. Would I have suited dreads and reggae?

I met Barney in that first year at Salford Grammar. He still gets really annoyed when I call him Barney.

‘You’re the only fucking person who calls me Barney. Everyone else calls me Bernard,’ he bleats. But at school they used to call him Barney Rubble – this even cropped up in an early Joy Division review – and his surname was Dickin so they took the piss out of him about that, too, as you can imagine. He changed it to Sumner after he finished school.

Barney wasn’t in my class, though. He wasn’t even in the same house. I was in Lancaster and he was in Gloucester, the other two being Warwick and York. There were a few lessons we shared, but not many. My first memory of him is standing outside the gym and him coming up, and I just went, ‘All right?’ and he went, ‘All right?’ and that was it; that was the first time we had any kind of contact. No indication that we’d be spending the rest of our lives together, in one way or another, and change the world of music not once but twice. Even then we didn’t really become friends at first, not really until the third year, when we both became skinheads.

A pair of right bastards we were too. Always in trouble. I hate to admit it now, but I was a bit of bully. There was a pecking order and you had to keep to it. I mean, I wasn’t the biggest – nowhere near, not by a long way – but I hung around with them and that kind of behaviour rubs off – peer pressure, as they say – and I did my bit. We all did. Plus, I was a thief. Oh my God, was I a thief.

It was quite normal where I lived, to steal, because basically we had nothing. Not that I’m excusing it, mind you. I mean, my mum had nothing and she was as honest as the day was long – she once found a ten-bob note on King Street and stood there for two hours to see if anybody came back looking for it. And I’m certainly not claiming that I became a tea-leaf because I didn’t get any affection from my parents, because nobody got affection in those days. But there it was. I was one. A thief.

Got nabbed for it, too, loads of times. Always getting beaten up by the coppers. Back then, if you got caught shoplifting, you got a good kicking from the police and you didn’t do it again. Well, you did do it again, but you know what I mean – we didn’t have to go to court and all that bollocks. The coppers just used to beat the shit out of you. Nowadays they’re kittens, aren’t they? Waste of time.

I remember once we’d done this bookies over, which – before you chuck this book away in disgust – isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. It’s not like we barged in there with sawn-offs and stockings on our heads; there was never any of that, never any violence – we were only thirteen after all. No, it was just that Salford at that time was being redeveloped: all the houses were being emptied, so what you had was a lot of crofts – which are bomb sites from the war, where a building’s been blown up and then cleared – and derelict houses. There was one particular row of empty houses with a bookies (or bookmaker’s or betting office, whichever you like) at the end of it. So what we did, me and my mates, was get some tools from somewhere and just break through the wall. It took us about a week to chip away enough bricks to make a hole big enough to crawl through, but that didn’t matter because there was nothing else to do. I mean, we were bored to death; we’d do anything for a bit of excitement, and we’d had enough of lighting bonfires and larking about in the empty houses. So we spent about a week carving out this hole, then squeezed through – only to find that the bookies was more or less empty. Later we were in the doorway of another shop, just messing about, as you do, and the police came screaming up. We scattered and they chased us. I ran down a back alley, pulling over all the dustbins behind me so the coppers were tripping up on them. But when I came out of the alley at the other end another copper tripped
me
up and sent me flying. He picked me up, put me in the van, kicked the shit out of me, took me to the station and did it again. I think I confessed to every crime ever committed in Salford that night. Then I got another battering off my mam when she had to come and get me. Ouch.

We stole from the Canada Dry warehouse. Used to wriggle through open windows into the factory at night and pass out a load of stuff. Next day I’d go into school with tins of cola and lemonade, sell them for 5p each, then treat everyone to the chippy at dinnertime. Shops, too, of course. In those days shops were in people’s houses: you’d go in,
the bell would tinkle and some creaky old dear would get up from the front room and shuffle into the shop, and by the time they appeared half the stock would have disappeared. I’d sell it at school. ‘Cakes, Biscuits. What do you want? Pens? I’ve got hundreds of pens.’

You know what? It was the same being in a group. Just goes to show that you can take the boy out of Salford but you can’t take Salford out of the boy, because we were
terrible
for nicking things in Joy Division and New Order. We used to go to these wonderful gigs with all this beautiful stuff backstage and nick it all. Now you’ve got bands like the Happy Mondays, or Oasis (in the early days), who had big scally reputations, but they had the same background as us: just working class thieves. You never had anything so you took it. Same attitude to music: you’ve got to start somewhere. The difference was that nobody expected that sort of behaviour from us in Joy Division or New Order because we had the arty intellectual image. These days I restrict it to hotels.

Back at school, the thievery lasted only a couple of years, until I got interested in girls. Meanwhile, me and Barney had become mates. He was funny. He’s got this really northern, evil sense of humour and he loves playing practical jokes (can’t take them, mind, as you’ll discover), and together we were bad lads. Like I said, we were both skinheads by then and we used to hang around with the school hard-nuts. His best mate, Baz Benson, was the cock of our school and my best mate from Regent Road, Dave Ward, was cock of the technical school, which was just across the playing fields from Salford Grammar. They’d take people’s dinner money and buy shit with it, get into fights, terrorize the teachers, all of that. We never used to do our homework. Fuck that, we just took it off the swots in the morning, gave them a cuff and copied it in the cloakroom.

We went back to school, me and Barney, years later. We were doing an article for the
NME
and the photographer was going on about how it would be great to get some pictures of us at our old school. So we were like, ‘Right, mate,’ and went and picked this guy up and drove over to Salford Grammar. But for some reason he hadn’t organized it properly. I think he may have phoned up the cleaner or something, who would have been like, ‘Who’s the group? No Order? Are they famous? “Blue Monday”? Never heard of it. Oh, bring ‘em along anyway.’

So we turned up, me and Barney in our leather jackets, biker boots
on –1982 or 1983, this was, so we were still pretty punky. But however weird we looked was nothing compared to how weird we felt trooping up to the gates of our old school. It had become a comprehensive by then but otherwise hadn’t changed at all: there were still the same grand old 1960s buildings, and they still had all the old prize cups in the cases, the wood panelling and pictures of all the head boys on the walls. What blew our minds was how it all looked the same except so much smaller. We were like, ‘Fucking hell, this is wild being back here.’ It even smelt the same.

We reached the headmaster’s office and the guy from
NME
said to the secretary, ‘Oh hello, I’ve got Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner here from the successful group New Order, and they’re old boys from the school. We just wondered if it was possible to take their pictures in the hall for the
New Musical Express
, the biggest music paper in England.’

She was nice enough, quite excited really, and said, ‘If you wait one second I’ll just ask the headmaster.’ And she disappeared off into his office. Then all of a sudden we heard, ‘
What
? That pair of dickheads!’ Then the office door flew open and out burst our old geography teacher, Dave Cain, now the headmaster, roaring at us: ‘You pair of bastards!’

Oh dear – we used to make his life a misery.

‘Get out!’ he screamed at us. ‘Get out, you pair of twats!’

And you know what? Straight away we were schoolkids again. It was like going back in a time machine. In a flash we were out of there, the head on our tails, clattering along the old wooden corridors in our jackboots. Not a word of a lie: we had to run off the premises, laughing hysterically, kicked out by our old geography teacher.

Not to be outdone, we skulked back when the coast was clear; the
NME
guy going slowly nuts because he needed to get his picture. Outside the school was a board with the name of the school on it. The photographer thought this board would make a nice image, so he positioned us near it, one either side, and got ready to take his picture. But the head must have been keeping watch, because all of a sudden we heard, ‘
Oi, you
! I thought I told you pair of bastards to fuck off!’

Again he came charging out. Again we legged it. The
NME
guy was still pointing his camera at the sign but we were off, so he still couldn’t take the picture he wanted – all he managed to get was a Polaroid, which I still have. We ended up doing the proper photoshoot near Barney’s old flat in Greengate, Broughton.

Anyway. Just before I left school, in 1973, I was sent to see the careers teacher, who said, ‘So what do you want to do?’

‘I want to be in a group.’ I think I’d seen Led Zeppelin the night before or something . . .

He rolled his eyes, reached across the desk and cuffed me round the head. Then, as I sat there rubbing my sore head, he said, ‘Do you want to get your hands dirty or not?’

And I went, ‘Well, not really.’

‘All right then,’ he sighed. ‘Obviously you want to go and work in an office. Well, we’ve got either Salford Town Hall or Manchester Town Hall. Which is it to be?’

Well I lived in Salford, so I went for an interview at Salford Town Hall. Now don’t forget I was a complete prick at school – I’d done no work whatsoever, and the only exam I was likely to pass was English. So when the guy at Salford Town Hall said to me, ‘Are you going to pass your O Levels?’ I said, ‘No, not really. I think I might get one or two if I’m lucky, but I don’t think I’ll get the others.’

‘Right – get out, y’bastard,’ he said, and threw me out.

So off I went off to Manchester Town Hall, where the guy said to me, ‘Are you going to pass your O Levels?’

And I went, ‘Yeah, course I am. Going to get ‘em all. Six guaranteed. No problem.’

And he said, ‘Right, okay, you’ve got the job.’

Bloody hell, that was easy.

I got a Grade 6 in English lit. at O Level – a pass,
just
– but that was it. I even failed technical drawing, my favourite subject. The teacher, Cup Cake we called him, a right daft old dodderer, hadn’t realized that there were two papers and gave us the second one right before the time ran out. When we complained he just said, ‘Tough.’ Barney did art. They always said that if you were awake you passed art, so he got two O Levels – art and English – and I got only one, because I didn’t do art. This became just one of many on-going rivalries between us.