Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (36 page)

Next thing you know, she screamed. ‘Ian, Ian, what have zey done to our room?’ We pissed ourselves laughing. Then Ian kicked off. Really kicked off. Shit. He heard us laughing from the other side of Barney’s door and launched himself at the door, screaming, ‘You fucking cunts, you fucking bunch of twats,’ kicking hell out of the door.

We weren’t laughing any more. We were scared, because let me tell you, he was going mental. Absolutely mental. What if he had a fit? What if he smashed the door in?

He calmed down enough for us to make our escape. But of course we still had their bed, which was in bits in the other flat. As we scarpered across there we had Annik on our tails and she launched herself at the door.

‘You peegs,’ she was screaming. ‘You fooking English peegs.’ Kicking the glass window in the door.

Of course we were in fits again, which just made it worse. God knows how we got the bed back together.

Part of the problem was that we were jealous of Ian, I think. Annik was fit and exotic, and Ian was living with her in the flat while we were all slumming it. Or that’s how it felt anyway.

Plus he was Martin’s favourite. As far back as
Unknown Pleasures
Ian had developed a special relationship with Martin – the two of them seemed to feed off each other creatively – and I think we sort of resented that, too, like Ian was the teacher’s pet or something. Especially as Martin treated the rest of us like shit.

Ian would say to Martin, ‘Do you need me for a while, Martin?’

Martin would say, ‘No, mate, you’re all right; come back at eight.’

So Ian and Annik would happily go off together, whereas me and Barney were always ‘that pair of bastards’. We’d play the tracks with Steve and Ian would do a guide vocal but then he’d return to record the proper vocals at night, when it was quieter in the studio. Which is fair enough – it’s a normal thing to do – but it did create a bit of a them-and-us situation.

It went both ways, of course. It’s a well known fact that we totally pissed him off during the making of
Closer
because he wrote a letter to someone – Rob, I think – saying that he wasn’t happy with the album, partly because of us lot, ‘sneaky, japing tossers’, he called us. But in his letters to Annik he says he was very happy with the album: strange.

You’ve got to say he had a point. I remember being in the flat one night and A Certain Ratio were round having a smoke with Rob. Me and Barney didn’t bother with all that so Barney was going, ‘What shall we do to them? Come on, we got to do something . . .’

So they’re all sitting there, squinting at us through clouds of dope smoke, going, ‘What are you up to, lads?’ as we set about our plan. First we smeared their minibus handles and windscreen in jam and marmalade, and tied toilet rolls to their exhaust; then we prepared eggs and pots and pans full of water.

When ACR finally made their way out we were waving goodbye to them from the flat windows, watching as they got to the bus and found the jammy traps. Next thing we were pelting them with water and eggs and killing ourselves as we watched them trying and failing to wrench open the doors and get out of the line of fire. Finally they
managed it and tore away, with two long trails of pink bog paper hanging off the back off the bus.

So Ian had a point. We
were
sneaky, japing tossers. Not long before he would have been a part of it too. So if we resented him for being Martin’s favourite and having a fit foreign girlfriend, well, maybe we also thought,
We’re losing our mate here.

His illness hung over us, though. One night we were in the studio. He was working on his vocals and he seemed a bit rattled about something and went off by himself. We were waiting for him to do a vocal and after a while Martin was going, ‘Where is Ian? Where the fuck is Ian? Hooky, go and find out where Ian is and drag him back here.’

So off I trotted and found him in the toilet, where he was sparkled on the floor, big gash in his head. He’d gone to the toilet, had a fit, fallen forward and banged his head on the sink, which had knocked him out.

Guess what? We brought him round, he said he was all right and we carried on. I should call the book that, shouldn’t I?
He Said He Was All Right So We Carried On
.

The other thing I remember is recording one afternoon and a bloke calling in to reception to see Martin. There was a group with him, a young group. They wanted to talk about Martin producing their first single.

So Martin went off to talk and of course, being nosy, I poked my head around the door to get a look at these kids, who it turned out were called U2. I don’t know if it had been raining outside but they looked like something the cat had dragged in, and they were sitting in reception staring at Martin with complete awe. Very funny.

They were huge fans of Joy Division, it turned out, and wanted Martin to produce their first single, ‘11 O’Clock Tick Tock’, which he did.

Years later I got the shock of my life when Tony told me one story about Bono. It seems that after Ian had died Tony met Bono somewhere, and Bono was telling Tony not to worry because he would take over from where Ian left off.

Ver y strange. But nice . . . Well, he did in a way, didn’t he? We may have been laughing at them in reception that day, the star-struck young pretenders, but just look at how our two careers went. Seven years later we’d been stung with a tax bill for nearly a million quid and losing all our money on a nightclub, while they’d gone off and made
The
Joshua Tree
, become the biggest band in the world and hadn’t opened a nightclub. And we all know how they feel about tax. They did everything right, in other words.

For the cover of
Closer
, as well as the twelve-inch of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, Peter Saville showed the band a series of photographs taken by Bernard Pierre Wolff of crypts in Genoa’s Staglieno Cemetery. Of course, these images would later take on an extra, tragic significance.

‘I guess it worked for Ian,’ said Saville. ‘Perhaps if I’d been sent a draft of the lyrics, and had any kind of sensitivity, I might have thought
, I’m not going to indulge that route. Let’s have some trees . . .’

The ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ single cover was done before
Closer
. We went to Peter’s studio in Portobello Road. He’d just seen an article about a photographer who’d taken some photographs of a cemetery on the outskirts of Genoa that was used by rich Italian merchants. These rich families had got into a macabre competition with the tombs, each building more and more elaborate monuments.

I loved the images and I loved Peter’s cover. I was always fascinated by the way the apostrophes both go the same way. They don’t frame the word
Closer
as you expect them to. I did ask him recently what that was all about, and it turns out that what I thought were apostrophes are actually full stops from the second century BC, and the reason they go that way is to do with the angle the original stone mason leaned when he was tapping out the words and punctuation marks. So there you go.

It’s a beautiful cover. We all loved the pictures, especially Ian. I wonder: when he chose them did he realize how symbolic they would be? I don’t know; nobody does, I suppose. In my gut I think not but I do think that he saw them and saw how they fitted perfectly with the music on the album – which itself was a kind of soundtrack to his suffering, I guess. Quite shocking really. By the time we chose those pictures he had less than two months to live.

With the American tour due to begin on 21 May at Hurrah nightclub in New York, Joy Division next embarked on a busy schedule of UK dates partly aimed at raising funds, including a Factory mini-residency at the Moonlight Club in Hampstead, as well as a prestigious support slot for the Stranglers at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park.

Prior to this gig, however, the Stranglers’ frontman Hugh Cornwell was sent to Pentonville Prison for possession of heroin, cocaine and cannabis, and the show was instead reconfigured as ‘The Stranglers & Friends’ with other well-known artists (Toyah, Hazel O’Connor, Robert Smith and Richard Jobson among them) filling in for Cornwell.

The night would also prove eventful for Joy Division, who were scheduled to perform there before returning to the Moonlight in Hampstead for the last night of the Factory residency. On stage at the Rainbow, Ian had a fit triggered by strobe lights and collapsed into the drum kit but recovered enough to play the Moonlight just over an hour later. He then had another fit during that set – though the performance was still rated a triumph by the
NME
’s Neil Norman, who wrote: ‘Unlike the Fall, who make me want to go out and kick a cat, Joy Division convince me I could spit in the face of God.’

Though the pressure was evidently becoming intolerable, and Ian spoke of opening a bookshop with Annik and even, according to Genesis P-Orridge, hatched plans with him to form a breakaway group, Ian nevertheless insisted to his band mates that they continue with the schedule.

It got chaotic now. Really, really busy. First off we had this label residency at the Moonlight Club in Hampstead, loads of Factory bands playing over three nights: Section 25, Crawling Chaos, John Dowie, A Certain Ratio, Kevin Hewick, Blurt, Durutti Column, X-O-Dus and the Royal Family.

And us. Being the biggest, it fell to us to attract the punters. Factory
were apparently nervous that the other bands wouldn’t be enough of a draw but I found that hard to believe, because the venue was tiny.

Anyway, we’d stayed down in London after recording
Closer
, and went on to do the first two nights of the Hampstead gig, the second and third of April, which went well – as in we turned up, played, did good gigs. One of the nights was attended by this A&R guy from Polydor called the Captain, who’s a bit of a legend in the industry. He’s a very tall, broad guy with a military bearing, hence the name, but a nice bloke. I’ve since met him many times over the years. He looks after U2 now, and was a big help in their career, but before all that he came to see us, which Ian was dead excited about.

‘Oh God, Hooky,’ he was going, ‘there’s an A&R man from Polydor here. He’s called the Captain. He’s great. Come and meet him – we might get some free drinks.’

Great. Free drinks. Well up for that. So after the set the band and Rob went to meet the Captain and discovered, firstly, that he was dead posh – ‘Hello. How are you, Peter?’ – like that; and secondly that he was going to get a round of drinks in: ‘Now, what can I get everybody?’

We were like, ‘Fucking great,’ and really took the piss, ordering triple vodkas and orange and two beers – each. But he just looked amused, said, ‘Fine, fine,’ went to the bar, ordered the drinks and handed them out.

‘Tuck in, everybody, tuck in. It’s all you chaps deserve after such an excellent gig.’

Then he turned to the barmaid. ‘How much is that, my good woman?’

‘Eight pound fifty, darling,’ she said.

The Captain reached into his jacket and pulled out a chequebook. At which point the barmaid looked absolutely incredulous, as though he was offering to pay with a huge purple marrow, and said to him, ‘We don’t take cheques, darling.’

So the Captain turned to us, looking suitably embarrassed and said, ‘I’m terribly sorry about this, but can anybody lend me eight pounds fifty to pay for the drinks?’

I think it was Ian who lent him the money to get the round in and the guy made a cheque out to him for the round of drinks, then slunk off as soon as he could.

Then came the gig at the Rainbow, where the Stranglers’ crew behaved like complete bastards. Before the doors opened I was on stage ogling Jean-Jacques Burnel’s set-up, which was split into high/mid/bass, like a proper PA. Oh, it was great. He had a really huge rig and I had a really small, cheap set-up in comparison. I was jealous. The problem was their crew wouldn’t let us move any of it so we could sound-check. That day the Stranglers’ crew were swanning about as if they owned the place because there were all these ‘pop stars’ hanging around, like Toyah and what have you. It was as though it had suddenly become this huge event or something. They were recording it to release as an album, too, which didn’t help.

All day the crew were just rude, to be honest. Because Jean-Jacques Burnel was one of my heroes I’d been really, really, looking forward to that Rainbow gig, so for them to treat us so badly was gutting and I held a grudge about it for a long time. Same with Rob.

It was at that gig, in fact, that we swore to ourselves that we’d make sure we never treated a support band the way the Stranglers had treated us, and thus a policy was born – one that arguably got out of hand in the Haçienda years, when visiting bands were treated like royalty. I used to moan and whinge about it at the time, but Rob would always remind me of that Stranglers gig.

He’d say, ‘Treat your bands how you want to be treated.’ And he was absolutely right.

The crew problem went right across the board, including the lighting guys. At most gigs Rob would position himself in the lighting booth so that if the technician went to the strobes he was there to sort it out straight away. We’d always know about it on stage because the lights would kick in then stop almost immediately, and you could just imagine Rob pushing his glasses up his nose and telling the technician to kill them or else. But that night we didn’t even get a sound-check so there was no way Rob was going to get in the lighting booth. Sure enough, during ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ the guy went to the strobes.

They were blasting away and not stopping like normal, and I thought,
Uh oh
, and no doubt so did Barney and Steve, and the next thing you know Ian’s dancing had fallen out of time and suddenly he’d lost it; his legs went, he stumbled back and into the kit and the lighting guy realized something was wrong and brought the lights down just as Twinny
and Terry dashed on and me and Barney took off our guitars and went to help Ian, who was fitting in the drums.