Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (7 page)

The Pistols were on for only about half an hour and when they finished we filed out quietly with our minds blown, absolutely utterly speechless, and it just sort of dawned on me then – that was it. That was what I wanted to do: tell everyone to Fuck Off.

On the way home that night we decided to form a band. If they can do it, we said, meaning the Pistols, then so can we.

We decided to follow the rules of punk . . .

Terry volunteered to be the singer. Barney had been given a guitar and a little red practice amp for Christmas, which made him the guitarist, so I thought, ‘Right, I’ll get a bass.’

Of course I’m pleased it worked out like that because I ended up learning the bass guitar, really making it my own and developing a very distinctive style, whereas (who knows?) if I’d tried learning the guitar I might just have been a bog-standard rhythm guitarist. It’s one of the strange things about writing a book like this, actually. You start seeing your life as series of chance happenings that somehow come together to make you what you are. You start thinking,
What if I hadn’t come back from Jamaica? What if I hadn’t bought that week’s
Melody Maker
or seen the advert for the Sex Pistols in the
Manchester Evening News
? What if Barney’s parents had bought him a Johnny Seven for his birthday instead of a guitar.

But they didn’t. They bought him a guitar so I became a bassist. The very next day I borrowed £40 off my mam, and got the bus to Mazel’s on London Road, Piccadilly, in Manchester. I had no idea how much guitars cost. But I think Barney’s was about £40. Mazel Radio was one of those shops that always felt dark, it was that filled with weird indecipherable stock. (I used to go there with Terry for fun most weekends.) It was an Aladdin’s cave stuffed with transistors, valves, accumulators, TVs, radios – all kinds of electrical doo-dahs.

And cheap guitars.

‘Can I have one of those, please?’ I said, pointing at them.

‘Well, what kind do you want, son?’ said the bloke behind the counter.

‘A bass one.’

And he went, ‘Well, how about this one?’

‘Is that a bass guitar?

‘Yeah.’

‘That’ll do.’

So I bought my first guitar, which I’ve still got: a Gibson EB-0 copy. No make on it. They tried to sell me a case but after bus fare I didn’t have enough money so I took it home in a black bin liner they fished out from behind the counter. Very punk.

Barney had been playing a bit so he showed me a couple of notes. He’d go, ‘Hold your finger there then move your finger to there. Move your finger back . . .’

We were off. Not long later, we got books on how to play: the Palmer-Hughes
Book of Rock ‘n’ Roll Guitar
and
Rock ‘n’ Roll Bass Guitar
. Mine came with stickers for the neck of the bass so you knew where to put your fingers. When the stickers wore off with sweat, I painted them on with Tippex. We’d be sitting round practising, with Barney shouting out the chords, like, ‘Play A, A, A, A, and then we’ll change to G, G, G, G.’ I’d practise by myself, too, but it was far more interesting learning together than it was playing on your own at home.

Teaching myself meant I ended up learning it wrong, though, because I picked up the bad habit of playing with three fingers. A teacher would have made me play with four, but the Palmer-Hughes
Book of Rock ‘n’ Roll Bass Guitar
didn’t talk back so I started off – and have ended up – a three-fingered bass player; and having to hold down my little finger as I play makes me slower. Saying that, I suppose it also gave me my style, which is slower and more melodic compared to most bassists’. It’s a different way of playing, and it came through learning badly.

We began by practising in Barney’s gran’s front room. I told you she was a lovely lady. She had an old stereogram record player, and Barney, who was always good with electronics, wired up our guitar leads to the two input wires on the needle cartridge so we could play through it. It worked as well. I mean, it sounded fucking diabolical, and if we both played at the same time you couldn’t hear anything but a wall of noise, but it worked. So we’d made it, we’d arrived – right up until his gran discovered that we’d wrecked her stereo and went berserk and threw us out. Then we ran down Alfred Street laughing.

But we didn’t care. We were punks. We raided Oxfam and cut up the clothes we stole; I spiked up my hair and took the dog collar off the dog to wear. My mam went mad yet again. At first we were just copying the look from
Melody Maker
and
NME
, and wearing what the London punks were wearing, but pretty soon we were developing our own style. Barney discovered the Scout shop on New Mount Street and started wearing a more military look (typical of him, he wanted to be a neat-and-tidy punk) while I used masking tape on my blue blazer to put stripes on it, and we both sprayed prison arrows on our clothes.

You used to get shouted at in the street for dressing like that; you were given the right leper treatment. I mean, these days nobody would bat an eyelid, but back then it was really shocking to see these kids walking round with hair in spikes and their clothes cut up. Which was, of course, why we did it – we wanted to be shocking; we wanted people staring at us. We loved that our mums hated it and that we had to get changed on the bus. It was all part of being a punk.

This was it for us: we’d get the guitars out, play around for a bit, go out so that people in the street could treat us like lepers, then come back and play around on the guitars some more. It was great.

The next punk happening in Manchester was the Pistols’ second gig, on 20 July, also at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Apart from the venue it was completely different: for a start, we were punks now and knew what to expect from the band; plus there were a lot more people there, not only because the word had spread in Manchester but also because the Pistols, unless I’m very much mistaken, had brought a coachload with them, which was exciting straight away. At that time if you put a group of Cockneys and a group of Mancs into a municipal building at the same time, a fight was bound to break out – which it did.

We were in the bar talking to these kids who were from Manchester. They’d come over to us, one of them going, ‘Hey, are you fucking Cockneys or what?’ all up in our faces.

And we went, ‘No, fuck off, mate, we’re from Salford.’

‘Oh, right. Well, we’re from Wythenshawe. We’re a group.’

‘Oh, right. We’re a group, too. Sort of.’

‘Well, we’re Slaughter & the Dogs. We’re supporting tonight.’

Wow – it was Slaughter & the Dogs; and this bloke’s name was Mick Rossi, the guitarist. Slaughter & the Dogs were one of the earliest punk
bands in Manchester – it was them and the Buzzcocks, who were also playing that night.

‘What’s your group called?’ said Mick Rossi.

We looked at each other. ‘Dunno. We haven’t got a name yet.’

Didn’t have a name. Didn’t have songs. Didn’t have a lead singer unless you counted Terry, which – after a couple of disastrous practice sessions – we didn’t. But still, we were a band.

‘Right, the Cockneys are here,’ said Rossi. ‘We’re having the Cockneys, we’re fucking having them.’

And this was the support band. So there was a hell of an atmosphere right from the beginning and, true to form, there was as much fighting as there was pogoing and moshing, everyone rolling around the room. It was more good-natured than you might have expected, but, even so, pretty chaotic and, because it was all going off, a lot more exciting than the first gig. At the first gig it all went off on stage. At the second gig it all went off in the audience
and
on stage.

Looking back, I don’t know which of the gigs was the most important in terms of the influence it had. A lot of people say the second because there were more people there, the Pistols were better known and punks had started to get going in the city, but for me and Barney it was the first because that’s when we decided to form the group. Overall I think you’d have to say they were both as important as each other. I mean, after those two gigs, bands had formed and venues were putting them on and there was a group of us who soaked up whatever punk we could. That autumn we saw the Stranglers at the Squat on Devas Street; in September, Eater played the first-ever gig, at Houldsworth Hall on Deansgate. Eater were supported by the Buzzcocks, who played at just about every gig in Manchester and were also doing a lot to help other punk bands find their feet. They’d encouraged us; their manager, Richard Boon, had come up with our first name, the Stiff Kittens, and later we found out that Ian had been in touch with them too. Together with the Drones and Slaughter & the Dogs they were the backbones of the punk scene and helped make Manchester the major punk city after London. They all played regularly at the Squat and at a gay bar on Dale Street called the Ranch, owned by Foo Foo Lamar, as well as at the Electric Circus in Collyhurst Street, which quickly became the city’s main punk venue.

Debbie Curtis remembers Ian talking to me and Barney at that second Pistols gig. (He wasn’t there for the first one, which he was always a bit pissed off about, but he brought Debbie along to the second.) Maybe we did share a few words that night but he certainly didn’t really register with me then. The first time I remember Ian making an impact was at the Electric Circus, for the third Pistols gig. He had ‘Hate’ written on his jacket in orange fluorescent paint. I liked him straight away.

The Electric Circus was an older, normal rock venue, in that it was a redbrick building, with a pointed roof like a church. The front door opened into one big, dark room with a high ceiling. The bar was on the right-hand side and there was a balcony, which I never saw open. In fact, the only reason I knew it had a balcony was that I was mooching around one night – this was later, when we were Warsaw – and somehow we got on to it, and there sat the Drones’ PA.

By that time the Drones were like Slaughter & the Dogs – real fucking mouthy, football-hooligan types, and we hated them. I mean, with the exception of the Buzzcocks, who were like the father figures of Manchester punk, all the bands hated one another and were forever trying to get one over on each other, and Slaughter & the Dogs and the Drones were the worst of the lot. The second time the Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall, Slaughter & the Dogs had their own posters made up that had their name above the Pistols’ and missed out the Buzzcocks altogether. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Horrible twats. They made us look like angels. The Drones were just as bad. So . . . Well, let’s just say something happened to their equipment. Something nasty.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that, once we’d put our knobs away, I knew there was a balcony in the Electric Circus.

Even before the Pistols played there the Circus was a big punk venue; and because there was only that and the Ranch, which was a punk club on Thursday nights, you got to start recognizing all the punks because they were going to the same two places on the same nights. The people who stuck out tended to be the well-known ones, like the Buzzcocks and Slaughter & the Dogs, or the guys with big personalities – people like John the Postman, the noisy bastard. Me and Barney were pretty quiet. We’d just stand on the side-lines and not get noticed, but you’d see the faces and you’d let on. ‘All right, mate, how are you?’ something like that. People got to know you.

The night of that third Pistols gig there was a really lively
atmosphere, to say the least. You’ve got to bear in mind that this was 9 December 1976, a week or so after the Pistols had done their
Today
-programme interview, when they’d gone on teatime TV and told Bill Grundy he was a ‘fucking rotter’. Next day it was all over the papers – ‘The Filth and the Fury!’ – and suddenly the Pistols were public enemy number one. They were about to go on their Anarchy tour with the Damned (who ended up getting thrown off it, for some reason), the Clash and Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, and because of the outcry most of the gigs were cancelled. Seventeen of the twenty-four dates were stopped by local councils. Among those that went ahead were two at the Electric Circus, and consequently a lot more people came along. The place was fucking rammed.

Even so, we recognized Ian. He stood out. Me and Barney were at the top of some stairs looking down and he came up the stairs with his donkey jacket on and we got talking to him because we’d seen him around. What were our first words to him? Fucked if I can remember. ‘Didn’t I see you at the Squat?’ something like that. I’m not sure we even found out his name that night, to be honest. He was just a kid with ‘Hate’ on his coat, just a normal kid. Of course, we were all punks, so we must have looked pretty wild compared to everybody else but he looked normal compared to us. He was nice. Softly spoken. Sharp sense of humour. Of the two portrayals of him on film, I prefer the one in
24 Hour Party People
. The guy in
Control
, Sam Riley, played him as being much more arty and conventionally pretty than he was in real life, whereas Sean Harris in
24 Hour Party People
had a bit more of the real-life Ian’s edginess and intensity. Neither were perfect and neither were totally off the mark, but for my money Harris was the more accurate.

It was at that same Pistols gig that we spoke to a guy from
Sounds
, who quoted us in his report of the gig – our very first national write-up.

‘Grotesque’, eh? Cheers, mate. Wroey was someone Barney had met in Broughton, a friend of his cousin Grimmie. We were trying him out as singer at the time, which is why he got a mention in
Sounds
. Like most of our singers he didn’t last and we added him to a growing pile of rejects. The problem wasn’t that they were terrible as such, just that they were the wrong sort of terrible. I mean, we just needed someone to sound horrible and shit – we were a punk band after all – but they weren’t right for it. For some reason they couldn’t do proper singing or horrible and shit singing, just awful singing, but not in a good way. I suppose it’s one of those star-quality things. You recognize it when you see it.