Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (35 page)

Next the band decamped to London for the recording sessions, leaving Terry Mason and Twinny at home and using Dave Pils as a roadie. He stayed at home in Walthamstow, Martin Hannett in a hotel, while Rob Gretton and the band rented two flats in York Street. The cost of this, however, meant that band members had very little to live on.

We had enough to get some food and maybe a pint, the usual. Both Sue and Iris worked, so at least me and Barney didn’t have to worry about providing, but Ian had a wife and kid back home, so, just like everything else in this story, it was harder for him.

It’s funny really, when you look at it like that, because nowadays if we’d released an album like
Unknown Pleasures
we’d have been nominated for the Mercury, be swanning around Glastonbury fighting off mates of Kate Moss and sitting on sofas with Fearne Cotton. Back then things moved much more slowly. Independent music stayed underground. Ian on the cover of the
NME
was as big as it got. We never felt like we were stars at all, and we never acted like it.

For a start we didn’t have any money, hadn’t really earned any yet.
We let Rob take care of all of that and he did it very well, keeping it all close to his chest. One of Tony’s favourite sayings was: ‘Always keep your bands poor. That way they make great music.’ He may well have been right. There’s nothing like sudden fame and wealth to turn a band’s heads.

But just every now and then it would have been nice to have tested his theory instead of being forced to prove it.

It made us a better band, though. I mean, Rob, you’d have to say, was very good at keeping you grounded, making sure your feet stayed firmly on the ground. His thing was: just get on with it, play live and record. That was how we went in to record
Closer
. We were keen to do an album as good as
Unknown Pleasures
but it wasn’t like there was huge pressure – not from Rob and not from Factory. All the pressure we felt came from within and we were brimming with confidence back then. Ian’s illness was the only black spot on the horizon. Otherwise we were rocking.

By that time we’d already recorded ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ at Pennine but weren’t happy with it so had another crack in Strawberry. Martin was up to his old tricks. He’d stay up till two in the morning then phone Rob and go, ‘Right, I’m going in the studio now with Chris to mix “Love Will Tear us Apart”,’ and Rob would phone me up and go, ‘You’re nearest: fucking get down to Strawberry now, Hooky; they’re mixing,’ and I’d go, ‘Fucking hell, it’s two in the morning.’

He’d just say, ‘Fucking get down there.’ Because he didn’t have a car, you see. So I’d drive to the studio at half-two in the morning, buzzing the buzzer for hours before they’d let me in, and Martin would say, ‘Oh, you turned up, did you?’

‘Yes, why are you doing it now?’

‘Oh, it’s the only time we could get.’ But it wasn’t – it was just so you weren’t there, so you didn’t turn up. Because one of the most famous things about Martin was that he hated having the musicians around during the mix, so he’d make it really difficult. The night he did ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ the air conditioning was cranked up as usual. I was freezing while Martin and Chris sniggered. He may well have been a genius, Martin, but that didn’t stop him being a right twat sometimes.

All of which didn’t bode well because we were due to record our second album with him, a prospect we might well have been dreading
but for the fact that we were going to London to record it, in Britannia Row studios, owned by Pink Floyd, just like proper rock stars.

Our families didn’t like it, of course. We got a lot of grief: ‘Why can’t you just record at Strawberry?’

I think Rob liked the idea of getting Ian away for a bit and of course Ian loved it because he got to shack up with Annik. Martin wanted to use Britannia Row because it was state of the art at that time and he did like his toys. Chris Nagle got the elbow, though. Martin wanted to use this other guy he’d met, John Caffery, who wasn’t wildly imaginative but was a nice bloke, while the tape operator was Mike Johnson, who later became New Order’s engineer on everything we ever did. We liked him and really got on with him; he was very imaginative and willing to try anything.

So we decamped to London, where Rob had hired two flats above a shop, which were opposite each other across a corridor, both two-bedroom. They were probably quite small but they seemed huge to us at the time, with open-plan kitchens and everything. Ian and Bernard had one side – with Annik in with Ian when she stayed over – while me Steve and Rob had the other side. Our flat wasn’t as cosy – it was a bit bigger, colder and more sparsely furnished – but was still okay.

Martin was in a hotel because he wanted to be as far away from us as possible because he thought we were pricks – and how right he was.

Then there was Brittannia Row itself. The studios we’d used in Manchester were a bit old fashioned. All wood-panelling and heavy drapes and cork tiles on the walls. Britannia Row was like something out of
Star Wars
in comparison. It was a bit more austere and clinical than anywhere we’d been at home. It had an enclosed spaceship atmosphere, with the control room in particular really packed full of stuff. There wasn’t much room for anybody else; we had a bench seat against the wall. Me and Bernard would position ourselves one either side of Martin, looking over his shoulder.

He was in his element there, Martin was. He loved the airless quality of Britannia Row. He loved how it felt sealed off from the outside world and started working at night to take advantage of it at its most silent and dead. Listen to the finished product and you can hear all of that in the album.

There were offices, too, so loads of staff hanging around – Pink Floyd’s staff, I think – and there was a PA company based there, plus
they had a recreation room with a pool table in it. Islington was a very interesting area. There was a famous taxidermy shop called Get Stuffed full of very exotic animals and a military shop on the corner where I used to stand staring in at the window, looking at these really expensive World War II flying jackets, lusting after them.

Every day we’d clamber into Steve’s car and drive the few miles from York Street to Islington, Martin arriving in his old beat-up Volvo. He’d ripped the speakers out and replaced them with two Auratone monitor speakers, studio speakers that are very flat but faithful. Martin said if we could make the mix sound good on the Auratones then it would sound good on anything. Nobody in their right mind would listen to Auratones for pleasure because they sound rotten; they soak up all the reflections and echo and wetness on a track, make everything sound dead dry and boring. But that was Martin’s scheme: make the record sound good on them and it’ll lop your head off on a set of decent speakers. Listening to a mix with him meant getting in his car and having him drive you around while you checked out how it sounded. He hadn’t bothered screwing them down, these speakers, so they just used to roll around the floor of the Volvo, and because Martin was such a terrible driver they did a lot of rolling around.

But of course we weren’t using him for his skill as a driver. As a producer he was getting the best out of us, and at the same time we were learning from him. It was him who encouraged us to use the piano; they had a grand piano at Brittannia Row. He put it on ‘The Eternal’, trying it on nearly every track. He showed Bernard how to use keyboards properly, how to layer them to give the sound a real richness and depth. Christ, he used to get pissed off with us, especially me and Barney: we were about as welcome as a dog at a game of skittles.

‘Oh, Martin, what do you reckon about making the high hat a bit brighter?’ one of us would say, strictly taking turns.

He’d scream at us. ‘Fucking shut up, you pair of twats.’

I’ve since discovered that Martin was on heroin then, and that one night he drove to Manchester and back to score, he was that desperate for it. But to be honest there was no evidence of that in the studio. He was smoking a lot of dope, as he always did, but otherwise really efficient and really creative. He introduced us to the ARP synthesizers and sequencers, which he and Bernard used a lot, and to audio gates,
used so that the drums would trigger synthesizer sounds and sound really crisp and powerful.

Martin’s big thing was still clarity. He always said that for a recording to have lasting effect and impact it had to have clarity and separation. Now, remember: me and Barney still didn’t like the sound of
Unknown Pleasures
. I mean, I suppose that by then we’d grudgingly accepted that it was a great album, and knew that part of that was down to the work Martin had done, but it still wasn’t how we heard Joy Division. We wanted a harder, harsher more metallic sound, like a group playing in a garage with metal walls, like the Stooges or Velvet Underground. He wanted us to sound like – how did he describe it? – adult gothic music or something.

Well, he was right and we were wrong. Sorry, Martin, if you’re up there. But it didn’t stop us bitching at the time because he’d make us play the song then take it apart.

‘Right, let’s concentrate on this bit,’ he’d say, and would do a lot of work adding effects and synth parts. He spent many a happy hour messing about with the synths and the sequencers, too – much to the studio manager’s delight, because it was an expensive studio, Britannia Row, around £40 an hour; considering I was only earning £12 a week, this was an absolute fortune.

So workwise it was great. As far as socializing went, this was when a division appeared in the band. The first, I suppose you’d have to say. It was caused by Ian finding his arty feet and us not handling this all that well.

By finding his arty feet I mean behaving a little bit pretentiously. There were other influences in his life now and he was soaking them up. One of these was Genesis P-Orridge out of Throbbing Gristle. Now I like Genesis, and I fucking love Throbbing Gristle, but I can’t get on with the whole none-more-arty attitude that goes with that scene. Genesis wrote the book on all that.

Then of course there was Annik. Although she had her flat in Parson’s Green she and Ian had set up house in his room in the flat across the way and were acting like a right pair of arty Bohemian types. Every five minutes they’d be announcing that they were off to some art exhibition or some gallery, with their noses in the air, making it perfectly clear that whatever they were doing wasn’t for the likes of us.

The fact that in return we gave it loads and called him all sorts of pretentious tossers wasn’t very nice of us, of course. If I’m honest, we were pretty horrible to him about it. So what if he wanted to go to an art gallery with his new beau? It was really none of our business.

But you know what it’s like. Young lads, their mate suddenly going off with his new girlfriend, taking on airs and graces: they rip the piss. I’ve no doubt that the likes of Genesis and Annik thought they knew the ‘real’ Ian, and that he was most at home in ‘their’ world. But we thought
we
knew the ‘real’ Ian. Probably Debbie did, too. What I’ve realized in the years since is that the truth was a lot more complex and in-between than any of us really knew at the time. Thinking about it, I bet even Ian didn’t know who the ‘real’ Ian was.

About halfway through the recording Rob announced that we should get our other halves down, and sent them money for train tickets. Debbie didn’t come, much to Ian’s relief. She used the money to pay a bill. I can’t remember the sequence of events, but that’s because it was a day best forgotten. For a start, we left them waiting around at the station for a couple of hours. Then they had to hang around while we finished in the studio, which didn’t exactly improve the mood. Later I accidentally blabbed to Iris about Annik being with Ian all of the time. Me and my big mouth. She kicked off, which added to the general air of gloom. She then told Lesley.

In short, the day was a complete debacle, because it was really expensive and everybody was as miserable as sin and I don’t even know why that day was chosen, because we were in the studio anyway, which didn’t help matters. So you had Sue, Lesley, Gillian and Iris all twiddling their thumbs, dead fucking pissed off at being dragged to London only to have to sit around, and fuming that they were apparently banned from the whole process while Annik was hanging around.

We breathed a big sigh of relief when it was all was over, I can tell you, and Rob celebrated by putting cornflakes in everybody’s bed. However, in order to escape suspicion, he put them in his own bed as well and was walking around scratching his head, going, ‘Well if we’ve all got cornflakes in our beds, then who’s fucking done it, then?’

A few days later the truth emerged and we were like, ‘You barmy bastard. What’s the point in japing yourself?’

Another night we overheard Ian and Annik getting ready go out, and Annik saying, ‘Ian, Ian, hurry and do the i-ron-ing.’ Just like that. ‘I-ron-ing’.
And there stood Ian, all done up ready to go out, doing Annik’s ironing with a fag hanging out of his mouth.

We were like, ‘I-ron-ing. I-an, have you done the i-ron-ing?’ which really pissed him off and he got really angry. Me and Barney noticed that they had a teddy bear in the eiderdown in their room and laid into him about that, too.

He was like, ‘Fuck off, you pair of twats. Just fuck off and leave us alone, would you?’

I feel terrible about it now, of course. Now I’m older and wiser, and now I’ve looked at his lyrics and worked out what a tortured soul he was. We should have left him alone to have his love affair but we didn’t because he wasn’t tragic Ian Curtis the genius then. He was just our mate and that’s what you did with your mates up North: you ripped the piss out of them.

One particular evening we got back before Ian and Annik, who were still out somewhere, probably at a gallery or an exhibition or something, and Barney said, ‘Come on, let’s jape their room.’

So we went in and the first thing we did – what a bunch of bastards – we took out the bed. No mean feat. Then we unfolded the i-ron-ing board, made the bed over the i-ron-ing board and tucked the teddy in the top. We hid in Barney’s room, looking through the keyhole waiting for them to come back. Didn’t have long to wait. A few minutes later the front door opened and Ian and Annik came into the flat and then went into the bedroom.