Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division
By Peter Hook
4/5
()
About this ebook
In Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, Peter Hook, bassist for the legendary, groundbreaking band Joy Division, takes readers backstage with the group that helped define the sound of a generation and influenced artists such as U2, Radiohead, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Unlike other books about Joy Division, Factory Records, or lead singer Ian Curtis—who took his own life just before the band's first U.S. Tour—Unknown Pleasures tells Joy Division's story from the unique perspective of one of the three surviving band members.
Told with surprising humor and vivid detail, Unknown Pleasures is the book Joy Division fans have been waiting for.
Peter Hook
Peter Hook was born in Salford, England, in 1956. He was a founding member of Joy Division and New Order, and now tours both bands’ music with his new group, Peter Hook and the Light. He also DJs, promoting Fac 51 and The Haçienda Classical concerts around the world. He lives in Cheshire, England, with his wife, Rebecca, and children, Heather, Jack, and Jessica, and their dogs, Wilma and Bo.
Read more from Peter Hook
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Reviews for Unknown Pleasures
75 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When 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.
This is a seemingly honest look at how things were back in the day when Peter Hook started out in not only Joy Division, but in life. He writes about having lived in Jamaica, in Manchester and of meeting Bernard Sumner, Ian Curtis and a plethora of drummers before coming across Stephen Morris.
He writes of the good, bad old days, and not so much of the current situation - where Hook and Sumner have communication issues that prevent them from functioning together - which is good. This is after all a book on Joy Division.
Hook has done a lot of thinking, maybe not because of Curtis' death, but maybe because he has re-hashed everything now that he's no longer part of New Order.
There's a lot of piss-taking of himself here, e.g.
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.
At the same time, it's great to see another angle of Ian Curtis, which is not the apotheosised person we often see today:
But looking back that’s exactly what he was: a people pleaser; he could be whatever you wanted him to be. A poetic, sensitive, tortured soul, the Ian Curtis of the myth – he was definitely that. But he could also be one of the lads – he was one of the lads, as far as we were concerned. That was the people pleaser in him, the mirror. He adapted the way he behaved depending on who he was with. We all do a bit, of course, but with Ian the shift was quite dramatic. Nobody was better at moving between different groups of people than he was. But I also think this was an aspect of his personality that ended up being very damaging to him. He had three personas he was trying to juggle: he had his married-man persona, at home with the wife, the laddish side and the cerebral, literary side. By the end he was juggling home life and band life, and had two women on the go. There were just too many Ians to cope with.
The book also displays what it's like being in a band, even one which has been lauded since after Curtis' death:
22 September 1978
Joy Division play the Coach House, Huddersfield. “One person turned up. It was diabolical.”
Plus some other details on other bands, e.g.:
14 November 1978
Joy Division play the Odeon, Canterbury, as part of their tour with the Rezillos and the Undertones. “The Undertones – they were so young. They’d bought an air pistol and were having target practice backstage, shooting cans off the stairs. Then someone brought in letters from home because they’d been away touring for a while, and next thing they were all crying in the dressing room reading letters off their mums. Me and Ian were looking at each other like, Aw, isn’t that sweet?”
I love the bits about how the tracks came about, e.g.:
‘Shadowplay’ happened in a similar way: Bernard had been listening to ‘Ocean’ by Velvet Underground and wanted to write a track like that, with the surf sound, a rolling feeling in it. So we started jamming and that’s how we came up with ‘Shadowplay’. You wouldn’t say it sounded anything like Velvet Underground, but once you know you can hear the root.
And a bit on how very little money was very good:
So that was two days to record Unknown Pleasures. Closer took three weeks. Movement took about two months and Waiting for the Siren’s Call, New Order’s last, took three years.
...and:
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.)
So how reliable is the book? Hook answers that himself, and I deem him to be quite reliable just by judging on how he writes, e.g.:
I liked Annik, though, and still do. Years later we talked about that interview she did at Dave Pils’ flat. It was featured in Control and my character’s sitting there saying dopey things about the name ‘Buzzcocks’, which I hated when I saw it. Made me look a right twat. I told Annik I would never have said anything so daft and she said to me, ‘Ah, but I have the tape, ‘Ooky, and zat is exactly what you said.’ So there you go. You shouldn’t trust a word I say.
And in ending:
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. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Well writ and very readable.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hooky gives an insiders view of the history of Joy Division and life inside the band. Even the most knowledgeable fans will learn something new here. An easy and enjoyable read but with too much on inter band pranks and not enough about the music for me. Martin Hannett has for long been credited with creating the Joy Division sound and this comes across clear in this account. The small insights into the various personalities within the band were interesting and sometimes amusing. Stephen coming across as a nervous wreck, Bernard somewhat selfish - note that Hook has publicly fallen out with his ex-band members - but he does give significant credit to them at various points in the book. Apparently Hooky always had to drive the van, which he reminds us of on every second page.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Peter Hook's "Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division" reads like a transcript of what you'd expect a conversation with Peter Hook at a pub to be, talking about Joy Division. This has its upsides and downsides. It makes the book, at times, a breeze to read, but other times, when Hook slips into colloquialisms that I, in Philadelphia, don't understand, the book is a bit disappointing. The structure of the book also seemed a bit off. There were sections where Hook would be telling the story, with occasional interjections in italics from someone who I can only imagine is the editor, and then there were sections called "Timelines" which recapped the previous sections from Hook in short snippets by date, but these also contained tidbits that weren't in the previous section. I would have liked an introduction that explained how the book was laid out, who wrote what, etc. I can only interpret this form as the punk ethos coming through in his writing, but I found that back-and-forth between times and styles to be jarring. On the whole, I found the breakdown of the two Joy Division albums by track to be the best parts of the book, and the ones that I wished were longer.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Okay. Two reasons why I requested this book for review. 1. The hombre loves Joy Division. and 2. I wanted to know more about the band. Now I’m not a fan. Yes, I listen to a few of the songs when the hombre plays them (I must say, he still has the CD set of Heart and Soul that I bought him as a gift years ago - which makes me all warm and fuzzy because I got him something that he loves and still listens to..anyway! I’m going off topic here....)I thought the book was pretty good - now I completely understand a fan would greatly appreciate this book as it gives you an insight on how the band was. I liked the way it was written, it was to the point, and at some times really blunt. I found myself laughing at bits of it. Gradually as the book progresses though, it does get more serious and more sad - since you know what’s going to happen to Ian Curtis and although he was undergoing serious health issues they just kept going. It’s admirable because they went through a lot of struggle in the beginning, but they persisted (it’s also extremely difficult to be successful as a rock band as I learnt while reading through this book)The book also includes a more detailed description on each track the band has made which I believe fans will greatly appreciate and lots of references to other bands they have met, toured with, and sometimes fought with (hah, those were funny parts). It was also interesting to see how Hook describes Ian Curtis during their tour stops. (He can be just one of the guys too - which was hard for me to see) You also had to sympathize for him and his struggle with epilepsy. Hook’s narrative is very good and easy to follow and above all very entertaining.Fans will greatly appreciate this book, non fans wanting to read how a real (yes I say REAL) band works should pick this up to get a glimpse at how hard it really is (no seriously, it’s really hard and not as easy as you think!) also, nice small appearances from The Cure and Bono!!!!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Peter Hook does a very good job making you feel like he is just having a friendly chat about Joy Division. His prose style is very informal and loose. And his different view of Ian Curtis does a great job making him less mythic and more human. It must have been a difficult journey for Hook to look at this time in his life, he repeatedly states his feeling that they all let Ian down (including Ian himself) and should have done something. But as with any book written by someone in a group dynamic, we get one man's side of every situation. Bernard Sumner might have a completely different view point. So we are left with a good book, that you must take with a grain of salt. I just got to the end and my everlasting feeling was simply "I miss Ian".
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I got into this book with mixed feelings. How can a bass player develop into serious writer? Thankfully I was so wrong. This book is really entertaining and it reads more like fiction than boring listing of facts. It's a true story, as Peter Hook remembers it. I liked how the book showed musicians side of Joy Division, compared to movie Control, which concentrated more on the cool factor of the band. You get the highlights and the downsides and funny insight to the life of a bass player. I'd recommend this book to not only Joy Division fans, but to anybody who's ever played in a band. It may be a long reach, but funniest parts of the book are comparable to adventures of Spinal Tap.
Book preview
Unknown Pleasures - Peter Hook
Introduction
It’s a strange life. Normally I don’t include any other people in my writing. Everyone remembers the same things completely differently. The contradictions really confuse you and spoil everything, making you question yourself and what happened. I proved it to myself by letting a very close friend see what I had written. He replied with a great comment: What’s the point of all this?
So, answers on a postcard, please.
Hooky
X
Prologue
January 1978
Our first gig as Joy Division and it ended in a fight. Typical.
Not our first gig. Before that we’d been called Warsaw but, for reasons I’ll explain later, we couldn’t carry on being called Warsaw, so we’d had to think of a new name. Boys in Bondage was one of the many suggestions and we very nearly went with another, the Slaves of Venus, which just goes to show how desperate we were getting.
It was Ian who suggested Joy Division. He found it in a book he was reading, House of Dolls, by Ka-Tzetnik 135633. He then passed it round for all of us to read. In the book, Joy Divisions
was the name given to groups of Jewish women kept in the concentration camps for the sexual pleasure of the Nazi soldiers. The oppressed, not the oppressors. Which in a punky, No Future
sort of way was exactly what we were trying to say with the name. It was a bit like Slaves of Venus, except not crap.
So that was decided: we were Joy Division. Little did we know what we were letting ourselves in for, that for years people would be asking us, Are you Nazis?
No. We’re not fucking Nazis. We’re from Salford.
So anyway, we had this gig at Pips Discotheque (formerly Nice ’N’ Easy) on Fennel Street in Manchester. It was our first official gig as Joy Division, though it had been advertised as Warsaw (the name change came over Christmas), and we were pretty excited come the night—me especially, because that day I’d been out and bought a brand-new guitar.
I’d been paranoid about my old one since recording our EP An Ideal for Living. Barney had told me it was out of tune between the F and the G. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded serious. So I’d saved up for a new one, a Hondo II, Rickenbacker Stereo Copy (I beat the guy down from £99 to £95) and tonight was its debut. Not only that but I had a lot of mates coming to see us—the Salford lot, we’ll call them: Alex Parker and his brother, Ian, Twinny, and all the lads from the Flemish Weaver on Salford Precinct, my local pub.
Before the show started, Ian Curtis had been listening to Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk over the PA. He loved that record. He must have given it to the DJ to play as our intro music, and I’m not sure if he was planning to get up onstage from the dance floor, or what he was intending to do really, but he was on the dance floor and he was sort of kicking broken glass around as Trans-Europe Express
was playing. Kind of kicking it and moving round to the music at the same time.
We already knew Ian was driven, and recently we’d been seeing how volatile he could sometimes be. He was going through a phase of acting up a bit, shall we say. A front-man thing, of course, and partly his Iggy Pop fascination, but also frustration—frustration that we weren’t getting anywhere, that other Manchester bands were doing better than us, getting more gigs than us. The Drones had an album out. The Fall, the Panik, and Slaughter & the Dogs all had singles out, and their records weren’t all muffled and shit-sounding like ours. To cap it all, here we were, our first gig as Joy Division, and only about thirty people had turned up—twenty of them my mates.
All of this got to me, Steve, and Bernard, too, of course, but Ian had it worse than we did. Probably because we all lived with our parents but he was married, so maybe the group felt more like real life for him somehow, more like something he had to make work.
Or perhaps I’m talking out my arse. Maybe Ian was just kicking glass because he was pissed and felt like it. Not that it mattered anyway: the bouncer didn’t care whether Ian was developing his stage persona or acting out his career frustration or what. He just saw a twat kicking glass. He stormed over, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, marched him to the door, and threw him out.
Great. Someone came and told us; so, instead of going on, the three of us had to go to the door and beg the bouncer to let him back in.
He was going, Fuck off, he’s a wanker kicking broken glass round . . .
And we were going, Yeah, but that wanker’s our singer, mate—he’s the singer of our band—you’ve got to let him in. Come on, mate . . .
Eventually, and after much begging, the bouncer relented and let Ian back in, and at last we got onstage, about twenty minutes late, looked out into the crowd—if you can call it that—and there were all my mates right at the front going, like, Hiya, Hooky. Are you all right, Hooky?
grinning at me and giving me the thumbs-up. I was thinking that it was nice of them to turn up, but the grinning and thumbs-upping I could have done without. In Joy Division we were very serious. We were more into scowling.
Meanwhile Barney was giving me daggers, like, Your mates better behave themselves.
Ian as well, the cheeky bastards.
Then Ian went, Right, we’re here now. We’re Joy Division and this is . . . ‘Exercise One,’
and I struck a pose with my brand-new Hondo II and hit the first note of the first song, an open E.
Except that instead of the first note of Exercise One
there was a massive boing sound, and everyone looked at me.
Oh, fuck. The string had flipped off the guitar. I pushed it back over the nut so it clicked into the hole and hit it again.
Boing.
It jumped out again.
Fuck, fuck, fuck-a-duck.
It was a fault on the guitar, honest. I had to hold the string in with my thumb and my finger as I was playing. I was just getting to the point of mastering that when I looked down and saw Alex Parker, who was a very good friend of mine, and his brother, Ian, all of a sudden start fighting.
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. I felt like the worst thing in the world.
Little did we know, eh?
Part One
Insight
Chapter 1
Oh, fuck, it’s Steve Harley
I’d started getting interested in pop music around twelve or thirteen, when, like every other kid back in those days, I was glued to Top of the Pops every week. Then somebody gave me a reel-to-reel tape recorder that already had a load of music on it, and I used to listen to that over and over again—stuff like Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.
Still, though, nothing could eclipse Top of the Pops, which I lived for. You forget now, what with MTV, YouTube, and the fact that music’s shoveled into your ears in every shop, restaurant, and supermarket, but back then Top of the Pops was the only way you could get to see pop music being performed. For a kid from Salford it was mind-blowing to see Deep Purple doing Black Night,
Sabbath ripping through Paranoid,
Family doing The Weavers Answer,
Marc Bolan, Bowie . . . It was like having a window on a wonderful other world, even if they were lip syncing. Plus it annoyed your parents.
As I got older I became a skinhead. This was way before skinheads were associated with the National Front. Back then it meant being into ska and reggae, ironically enough, and from that I discovered the Upsetters, the Pioneers, Desmond Dekker, Dave & Ansel Collins. It wasn’t until the fourth year that I got my first record player, though, when I bought one from Martin Gresty, who needed some quick cash. I don’t think his mum even knew he was selling her Dansette, to be honest, but I gave him eleven quid for it, which was all the money I had and a fortune in those days. Of course that meant I couldn’t afford to buy any records, which my mother thought was hilarious. So I nicked some. There was a shop on Langworthy Road that used to have old ex-jukebox singles for sale in a box outside and I swiped a couple sight-unseen, just to have something to play on my Dansette. When I got round the corner to take a look at my haul I wasn’t exactly overjoyed: Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town
by Kenny Rogers and The Green Manalishi
by Fleetwood Mac. I’d never heard of either. Still, at least I finally had something to listen to. Or so I thought. Turned out I couldn’t play them—since they were for a jukebox they needed an adaptor—and it took me another week to steal one! Years later I appeared on that BBC program The One Show, talking about the first record I ever bought: I told them it was Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town
; I didn’t tell them that I’d nicked it, though.
But when I really got into music—when the bug didn’t so much bite as take a huge fuck-off chunk out of my leg—was on holiday in Rhyl. This was just before I left the Town Hall for Butlin’s (a popular British holiday camp): 1973, it would have been. There was me and my mates: Deano, Stuart Houghton, Danny Lee, and Greg Wood, five of us in a four-berth caravan. Christ it was freezing, and there was no electricity—there were gas mantles for lights—but it was the first proper holiday I’d ever had, and we spent it roaming the streets of Rhyl and listening to Radio Luxembourg in the caravan. They kept playing a song called Sebastian
by Cockney Rebel. That was it for me. For the first time, I listened to a record and really thought, Wow. Why, I don’t know. Because it was different, I suppose; it seemed so different. It had a slow, orchestral start and built to a climax—it was very long, too, which was something unheard of for a pop record back then. It just grabbed me—grabbed my attention and held it. Strange how we’d be doing another very long song with Blue Monday
years later.
When I got back from holiday I bought the single. It was nine minutes long and you had to turn the record over halfway through, which just added to the experience: it was part of the ritual of playing it, gave the song a dramatic pause and made me like the record even more. After that I became a fan of Cockney Rebel and bought their first LP, The Human Menagerie—a great record. They became my gateway to music. Before this when I’d watched Top of the Pops I’d just goggled at it, but now it was like I was part of it; I understood it. Bowie, Roxy, Ian Dury—I started to get them now.
Years later I was at an awards ceremony with New Order getting an award for Blue Monday.
I’d given up drinking by then, so I was straight as an arrow when Steve Harley strolled up to me, and I thought, Oh, fuck, it’s Steve Harley from Cockney Rebel.
He went, Hello, Peter, how are you?
And I thought, Not only is it Steve Harley, but he knows who I am and he’s dead fucking nice.
He went, Oh, it’s so lovely to meet you. I believe that our first record was one of your inspirations?
I was like, Yeah, yeah, it was,
and ran away. Just couldn’t deal with it. Left him standing there looking around and no doubt thinking, That was fucking bizarre. But it wasn’t as bizarre for him as it was for me. Sebastian
had got me into the whole thing. If it hadn’t been for Steve Harley, I wouldn’t have been standing at that awards ceremony talking to Steve Harley. Very, very weird, that was.
After that—Rhyl, I mean, not the awards—I started reading NME and Sounds. Then we began going to gigs with Barney, who I’d met in my 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. Both of us had scooters but Barney got his first; they’d changed the driving age from sixteen to seventeen and he lied about his age to get his. My birthday being in February meant I had to wait a year. We were both gradually getting into music: starting with soul and reggae, moving into pop. Barney’s scooter was adorned with stick-on letters spelling Santana,
his favorite group, and I had Abraxas
on mine, the name of their second album, and we used to ride around Langworthy Road on our Santana-themed scooters, looking for girls to chat up.
A right pair of right bastards we were, too. Always in trouble. Always stealing things, which we continued to do when we were in bands. 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 behavior from us in Joy Division or New Order because we had an arty, intellectual image.
So anyway, we’d started going to gigs and we saw Led Zeppelin; Cockney Rebel, of course; and half of a Deep Purple set before Barney made us leave because he had a toothache. It wasn’t just him who had to leave: it was all of us. He’s always got away with fucking murder, that one.
I first read about the Sex Pistols in April 1976, on another holiday. Me, Stuart Houghton, Danny Lee, and Danny McQueeney decided to go to Torquay and Newquay in my new car, a Mark Ten Jag 420G, registration KFR 666F (funny how I can remember all the numbers)—the same model the Krays had—that I’d bought for £325. We weren’t staying anywhere, just sleeping in the car. Needless to say it was tough but enjoyable; we got on well—it was one of those holidays I’ll never forget. The tires were knackered and we couldn’t go more than fifty miles an hour—took us hours and hours to get there. But one thing I do remember was sitting in a car park in Newquay at about seven in the morning, still pissed from the night before, reading Melody Maker. It had the Sex Pistols in it, and there was a picture of them taken at their gig at the Nashville Rooms where a huge fight had broken out. Sitting there in the car park in Cornwall, with the sun coming up and all my mates snoring in the Jag, I had an epiphany.
First off, I was intrigued by the idea of a group who seemed, I don’t know, human compared to bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, who seemed, to a working-class tosser from Salford, so out of my league they might as well have lived on another planet. I mean, I’d never have looked at Led Zep and thought, I’m going to be the next John Paul Jones. He was like some kind of god up there. I loved the music. I loved watching it. But the idea of emulating them was ludicrous.
The Sex Pistols, though: they looked like working-class tossers too, which automatically made them completely different from anything I’d seen in music before. I was a great fan of James Dean; I’d seen Giant and Rebel Without a Cause. And now I felt a connection between him, these punks, and me. That real snotty, rebellious, arrogant-kid type of thing, only not in glossy-looking 1950s America but in gray old 1970s Britain. The Pistols were the link somehow. And the fact that they had a reputation for fighting at every gig and were part of this movement—this punk movement . . .
I was like, I have got to see this lot.
Timeline One
May 1948–April 1976
MAY 31, 1948
Martin Hannett born, Miles Platting, Manchester.
From an early age Hannett showed an aptitude for mathematics and science, interests he would carry through to his musical theory. Gaining a chemistry degree from Manchester’s UMIST, he played bass for Greasy Bear before forming the Invisible Girls, the backing band for John Cooper Clarke and, in later years, Pauline Murray and Nico. Together with Tosh Ryan he helped set up the musicians’ collective Music Force, then Rabid Records, the home of Slaughter & the Dogs. Styling himself Martin Zero, he went on to produce the Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP, the first release on the independent New Hormones label run by the Buzzcocks’ manager, Richard Boon. He produced Slaughter & the Dogs’ debut single, Cranked Up Really High,
then worked with Chris Sievey (later known as Frank Sidebottom) and his band the Freshies, before scoring a top 3 hit producing Graham Fellows’s Jilted John
in July 1978. (Indeed, Hannett can be seen playing bass on a Top of the Pops performance of that song.) Shortly afterward, he produced Joy Division for the first time.
APRIL 26 (HE ASKED ME NOT TO PUT THE YEAR IN)
Alan Erasmus born, Didsbury.
Erasmus and Tony Wilson became friendly when they met at a Christmas party and bonded over a spliff. For a while Erasmus managed Fast Breeder but parted company with them and instead sought out Wilson, the two joining forces to put together a new band, the Durutti Column. The flat Erasmus shared with best friend Charles Sturridge (a Granada director who went on to make Brideshead Revisited) was at 86a Palatine Road, and doubled up as the Factory HQ.
FEBRUARY 20, 1950
Tony Wilson born, Salford.
Wilson attended the De La Salle Grammar School in Salford, developing a love of drama and literature thanks to a performance of Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon. At seventeen he worked as an English and drama teacher at the Blue Coat School in Oldham; he then attended Cambridge, graduating with an English degree in 1971. After working for ITN as a trainee reporter he returned to Manchester in 1973, joining Granada and presenting Granada Reports as well as the music program So It Goes. However, the end of So It Goes left Wilson pondering ways in which he could continue and extend his involvement in the music business. . . .
JANUARY 15, 1953
Rob Gretton born; raised in Newall Green, Wythenshawe.
A fierce Manchester City fan, Gretton worked as an insurance clerk before leaving the job to work on a kibbutz with girlfriend Lesley Gilbert. He returned to the UK in 1976 and became involved in the emerging Manchester punk scene, working with Slaughter & the Dogs, then the Panik.
OCTOBER 9, 1955
Peter Saville born; raised Hale, Manchester.
Saville attended St. Ambrose College before studying graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic. Envious of contemporaries Linder Sterling and Malcolm Garrett, who had already made their names designing for the Buzzcocks and Magazine, and learning of the soon-to-open Factory club, Saville approached Tony Wilson at a Patti Smith concert. Not long afterward, the pair met in the canteen at Granada, where Saville showed Wilson a book of Jan Tschichold typography . . .
JANUARY 4, 1956
Bernard Sumner born; raised Lower Broughton, Salford.
Sumner attended the Salford Grammar School, where he met Peter Hook.
Years later, me and Barney went back to school. We were doing an article for 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 paneling 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 smelled 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? Straightaway 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 on 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 get the picture he wanted—all he managed to get was a Polaroid, which I have. We ended up doing the proper photo shoot near Barney’s old flat in Greengate, Broughton.
FEBRUARY 13, 1956
Peter Hook born.
JULY 15, 1956
Ian Curtis born, Stretford, Manchester.
Early academic prowess saw Curtis admitted to the King’s School, Macclesfield; while there he met Deborah (Debbie) Woodruff. He was also friendly with Helen Atkinson Wood, who later found fame playing Mrs. Miggins in Blackadder, and gave her his copy of The Man Who Sold the World. He passed seven O Levels but dropped out of school midway through studying for his A Levels to begin a job at Rare Records in Manchester. He became engaged to Debbie on April 17, 1974. After a spell running a record stall, he took jobs in the civil service, eventually settling in Oldham after his marriage in 1975. Still dreaming of a career in the music business, Ian placed an advert in the music press, signing himself Rusty,
which attracted the services of guitarist Iain Gray.
DECEMBER 13, 1956
Deborah Woodruff born, Liverpool.
Having left Liverpool when she was three, Deborah’s parents set up home in Macclesfield, where she attended Macclesfield High School for Girls, a sister school to the King’s School. She became acquainted with Ian in 1972 when she was seeing his friend Tony Nuttall. When she and Tony split, she agreed to go on a date with Ian, to see David Bowie at the Hardrock Concert Theatre in Manchester. Soon they were a couple. Deborah was Ian’s second serious girlfriend.
OCTOBER 12, 1957
Annik Honoré born, southern Belgium.
To satisfy a voracious musical appetite, Annik traveled to gigs throughout Europe, seeing Siouxsie & the Banshees more than a hundred times, as well as Patti Smith, the Clash, Generation X, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie. Like Ian Curtis, her favorite album was Bowie’s Low. Annik became involved with the fanzine En Attendant, and then made plans to move to London. In the meantime she saw Joy Division for the first time at the Nashville Rooms on August 13, 1979, having traveled from Belgium especially to see them, and two weeks later interviewed the entire band at the Walthamstow flat that a friend of the band, Dave Pils, shared with his girlfriend, Jasmine. By September that year Annik was living in London, in Parsons Green, and working at the Belgian embassy.
OCTOBER 28, 1957
Stephen Morris born, Macclesfield.
Morris attended the King’s School, Macclesfield but was expelled for drinking cough syrup. Morris had drummed with the Sunshine Valley Dance Band, a group of school friends, and worked for his father’s firm, G Clifford Morris, a local plumbers’ merchants. He spotted two adverts in the window of Jones’s Music Store in Macclesfield: Drummer wanted for punk band the Fall
and Drummer wanted for local punk band Warsaw.
Luckily for him he responded to the advert with the local phone number.
AUGUST 23, 1975
Ian Curtis and Debbie Woodruff marry, Henbury.
APRIL 23, 1976
The Sex Pistols play the Nashville Rooms, London.
It was by all accounts an unremarkable concert until Vivienne Westwood decided to liven things up
by slapping a female audience member. The girl’s boyfriend rushed to help her, at which point Malcolm McLaren came to the aid of Vivienne, then the band to the aid of them both. All of which was captured in