Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (39 page)

Oh, and I remember going to the inquest later, with Rob, and maybe Steve, which was even more surreal because there was bad feeling towards us – towards the band. Like his mum and dad thought we were responsible. I can vividly recall Debbie’s dad giving evidence about Ian, saying, ‘He was on another plane.’ I was thinking,
Fuck, I wish it had been that plane to America
. They were talking about him as if he were a stranger and the inquest found that he’d taken his own life under the influence of alcohol.

Me, I felt guilty. Guilty that I never went to see him when he was lying in state. Guilty that I never said goodbye. Guilty that, like everybody else, I went along with Ian when he said he was all right; that I was so wrapped in my own bit of me, of the band, that I never took the time to listen to his lyrics or him and think,
He really needs help.

So, yes, I felt all of that, and still do. I’m sure I’m not the only one. In a way we’re all of us to blame, but none of us are. Years later I remember Dave Pils telling me that when we’d last stayed with them in Walthamstow Ian had left his mac behind, the famous mac he always wore. Dave had grabbed the mac and gone running after the car when we left, but it was too late, we were gone. That was the last time Dave saw Ian.

‘What did you do with the mac?’ I asked.

‘Took it down the charity shop, Hooky,’

I thought,
You silly sod. The charity shop? Who would do something like that?

But then even later I was talking to one of our roadies, Corky (Mike Caulfield). He was reminiscing about our old practice place in Cheetham Hill and how it used to have Ian’s scarf hanging on the back of the door. A proper old man’s woolly scarf, it was, brown and grey and black. We’d brought it from the rehearsal room at Pinky’s when we moved.

Corky said, ‘What happened to it, Hooky, that scarf?’

I thought,
Oh fuck
– because with a sudden jolt I realized I’d taken it to the charity shop. I’d forgotten it was Ian’s scarf and donated it.
What an idiot
, I thought.
Who would do something like that?

Well, I had. I suppose in the end it’s almost too easy to look back and say what you should have done, how you might have changed things. How you might have done things differently and ultimately stopped Ian from doing what he did. What’s harder – what’s much, much harder – is to accept what you actually did do. Accept what you did and live with it. At that point I thought that the worst thing that had happened was me losing a friend, the band losing a member. It took me a long time to realize that a child had lost a father, a mother and father had lost a son, a sister had lost a brother, a wife had lost a husband, a mistress had lost a lover. All a lot more important than me and the band; we paled into insignificance. You’re selfish when you’re young and I suppose in many ways that’s self-preservation. Now I’m embarrassed to have put us first. Even after writing and researching this book I’m no clearer as to why he decided to end it on that night. About what made that night different. The only odd thing I see is the dog story: Candy going to the farm. It seems like such a cliché. Did they have the dog put down, I wonder? Was that what was too much for him to bear on top of everything else? I will never know.

We packed everything in a little box once he’d gone, and put it away. Now, of course, Ian’s with me all the time, and even this book is as much about him as it is me. But back then – then it was like the group disowned the group. I mean, Joy Division’s popularity skyrocketed: ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ came out and was a great success, then
Closer
, but we didn’t promote them, didn’t play them, didn’t read reviews of them, didn’t want to know about sales, nothing. Didn’t care about them.

The only thing we took from Joy Division – the only two things, actually – were the songs Ian had left us: ‘Ceremony’ and ‘In a Lonely Place’. To each other we said, ‘See you on Monday,’ and that was it. Me, Barney and Steve got together on the Monday to work on the songs. I took the riff for ‘Dreams Never End’ into rehearsal. It was weird because I was looking for Ian to tell me if it was any good or not. Realizing that we’d lost our spotter, our mentor. Realizing that suddenly we had to
find a new way of working that didn’t rely on him. We had to learn to record everything, play it back and pick out the good bits ourselves.

We never considered carrying on as Joy Division, though. We had made a pact years before that if one of us didn’t want to do it any more, or if anything happened to any one of us, then Joy Division would be over. The group was finished. I mean, the desire to carry on was uppermost, but as for trying to carry on as Joy Division with one of us lot singing, or even getting in a new lead singer, it never even came up. We just knew that Joy Division was over. But we wanted to continue as a band, to carry on making and playing music. From a purely practical point of view, we did have the core of a band so it seemed right to carry on. There was, of course, the problem of who was going to sing the songs. That wouldn’t be resolved for a while. In fact, right up until we played our first gig as a three-piece, all three of us were singing two or three songs each, but we got there in the end.

Then there was the business of finding a new name. We sat down one day to try to come up with one, thinking that we were going to learn our lesson this time, and that whatever name we came up with wouldn’t be anything even vaguely Nazi-sounding.

No way, we thought. No fucking way were we going to make that mistake again.

I really recommend listening to the record while you read.

‘Atrocity Exhibition’

This is the way, step inside . . .

Me and Barney were bored writing on our own instruments so we just thought,
Let’s swap.
Barney plays bass and I play guitar on ‘Atrocity Exhibition’. I was nowhere near as proficient a guitarist as him, mind you, but I like the way it sounds. Great riff. Great bass too.

During the recording Iris had insisted I go home for a christening or a wedding or something, and Martin mixed the first two tracks while I was gone: ‘Heart and Soul’ and ‘Atrocity Exhibition’. I remember coming back and being dead excited to hear them because I played the guitar really heavily on ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ and I loved it. So there we were, sitting in Martin’s Volvo. Barney put the cassette on so I could listen to the mixes and the bass was really low on ‘Heart and Soul’, very dead and quiet, and I was, like, head in hands,
Oh fucking hell, it’s happening again.
Unknown Pleasures
number two.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, he then put on ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ and Martin had fucking melted the guitar with his Marshall Time Waster. Made it sound like someone strangling a cat and, to my mind, absolutely killed the song. I was so annoyed with him and went in and gave him a piece of my mind but he just turned round and told me to fuck off.

Rob said, ‘Fucking hell, Hooky, if you’re going to fuck off home you’ve got to be prepared to take what happens in your absence.’

‘Isolation’

Mother I tried please believe me . . .

This is an interesting track because it has no guitar on it. If we wrote ‘Isolation’ now, Barney would not only have played the synth but would have done a guitar part too. We would have done a low part, a medium part, a high part; we’d have done a part you can’t hear, a part on the left, part on the right; we’d have killed it. So it was the inexperience involved in us writing ‘Isolation’ that just kept it dead simple, straightforward and very, very effective. What Martin did was take the original drum track, flange it and effect it through his synth, then get Steve to overdub the drums so they were separate; then he could have
them really up front in the mix, not buried in a drum mix. Plus he used the drums to trigger his synth, which was, again, ahead of his time. Barney overdubbed the Arp over the Transcendent, playing the same part, and it sounds current even now. Nice vocal effect. I mean, Martin was a fucking genius, without a shadow of a doubt. The way the acoustic kit comes in halfway through the song is fantastic.

Martin had finished it with a dead stop and the echo going off. But there was a click on it and he wanted to edit it out. But John Caffery got in a right mess – too nervous, I think – and couldn’t get the edit to work. And the more he tried to fix it the more he was losing of the take – and this was the only copy of it. Don’t forget that editing was done with a razor blade, cutting out the part you didn’t want then sticking with tape the bits you did. He was working on the master, so the tape was getting shorter and shorter. In the end Mike Johnson, the tape op/tea boy, had to come in and rescue him, to rescue the edit. That was what impressed us so much about him and why, when we came back in to record as New Order, we got him in as our engineer. That’s why ‘Isolation’ sounds a bit weird at the end. It’s a great song, though. If we’d believed in releasing singles off albums then we would have released it, but we always knew ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ was going to be the next single and we were far too bloody-minded to put the singles on the albums.

‘Passover’

This is the crisis I knew had to come . . .

I’m playing six-string bass on this, the first time I used it, I think. I got it on Barney’s recommendation, actually. He’d seen it in Mamelok’s music shop on Deansgate and very graciously suggested I go and have a look at it. ‘You should get it, you should get it; it’s fucking great. You could really use it, because the way you play is guitar-like.’ Which was very nice of him.

So I went and tried it out and, lo and behold, something about it got me playing it like a guitar. I suppose, in a way, I’ve always been a frustrated guitar player who plays bass, but what I’ve done is stuck with bass and made it a guitar. So getting the six-string bass actually felt quite natural. Around the same time we tried out some effects pedals, again on his recommendation, I got the Electro-Harmonix Clone Theory,
because of the fragility of the six-string sound, and that really helped it, fattened it up. Everyone thinks it’s a guitar but it’s not; it’s the six-string bass. It was quite a departure for me. Coupling the chorus with a short eighty-millisecond delay gave me the sound for the next phase of my career. This track has great crescendos and dropdowns and is one of my favourites. Ian’s lyrics are insanely good with hardly any repetition.

‘Colony’

A worried parent’s glance, a kiss, a last goodbye . . .

Great lyrics. ‘Colony’ is on the four-string bass. These songs are the product of a great group, without a shadow of a doubt: music chemistry at its best. Steve’s drum riffs, the bass riffs and the guitar riffs are all excellent. The whole lot of them on every song are excellent. I shouldn’t say it really, because I was in the band, but I love this album. There’s not one dodgy track on it. It’s very atmospheric, very powerful. If you listen to
Unknown Pleasures
there’s a bit of reticence on some songs, but not on this L P. Every song is confident – which is strange, given the fact that most of the music is very melancholic, very fragile but intense.

‘Means to an End’

Two the same, set free too, I always looked to you . . .

This is the pop song on the album. It’s a fucked-up disco song. We had it worked out a little but finished it in the studio. Martin always liked it when we did that – it meant he could put his stamp on it. Weird: the verse has four ascending notes all next to each other, with no thought to sharps or flats. It’s very unusual. I liked that.

‘Heart and Soul’

Existence well what does it matter . . .

This is so seductive, a very sexy song that has many layers. I wrote the low bass and we transferred it to the synthesizer. Martin showed Barney how to layer and structure the keyboards, the strings especially, and that’s what he’s doing here – playing the low bass, while nice and low in the mix you’ve got my six-string bass. This was another occasion when Martin really took the heat out of it during the mix, downplayed it, but
it really adds to the atmosphere. I was upset when I first heard it but he was right and I was wrong.