Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (15 page)

He sighed again. ‘Oh. Let me have a look. Let me have a look,’ and he flicked through his book, pretending to look. ‘Oh sorry, mate,’ he said at last, ‘I can’t give you that one. Someone else is doing that.’

My face fell. ‘Who?’

‘Joy Division,’ he said. ‘Group called Joy Division are doing that; bad luck.’

I said, ‘That’s great because
we’re
Joy Division.’

You’ve never seen anyone back-pedal like it. ‘Oh no, no, no. I mean, I mean . . . someone else is doing that. Look, fuck it, fucking don’t bother me, all right. Get the fuck out.’ He threw me out. That was it. I walked back to work feeling very down and demoralized, which is a feeling you have to get used to when you’re managing a band, any band, but definitely ours at that time. We were hurting for gigs, and we needed a manager to help us get them.

The Stiff Test/Chiswick Challenge, a touring talent show set up by the two labels, came to Manchester Rafters on 14 April 1978. Local groups affected to scorn the enterprise for its London-centric air, but twelve or thirteen turned up to play anyway, hoping to impress the label heads. They included an impatient Joy Division as well as a ‘joke’ band, the Negatives, formed by journalist Paul Morley and photographer Kevin Cummins. Meanwhile, Ian Curtis barracked Tony Wilson for failing to feature Joy Division on
So It Goes.

The Stiff/Chiswick night was like
The X Factor
. Except it was like
The X Factor
for punks, so a bit of a free-for-all and a very highly charged night indeed. The sight of our roadie, Platty, chasing Kevin Cummins out of Rafters, with him clutching his drum kit and screaming like a baby, is going to stay with me for the rest of my days – I hope.

It was Stiff we wanted to impress. They were
the
cool record label. They had Wreckless Eric and Kilburn & the High Roads – later to become Ian Dury & the Blockheads – and was run by a guy called Jake Riviera, a bit of a legend in the music business, who might sign you if he liked you. Needless to say we were dead keen to get on the bill but the competition was fierce. Like the last night of the Electric Circus, everybody turned up and everybody wanted to play.

Having already been shafted by Fast Breeder, we knew that if we went on too late all the punters would have buggered off, so we were desperately trying to get on as early as we could. Trouble was, so were all the other bands. It was already dog-eat-dog, with everybody thinking that this could be their big chance and arguing about who was going to go on, when Morley turned up with Kevin Cummins and some others in tow, taking the piss with their made-up punk group. They thought it was going to be dead funny to audition as a band who
couldn’t play. What a hoot. Maybe it would have been funny – I mean, let’s not get all no-sense-of-humour about it – maybe we would have seen the funny side if we hadn’t been a group who could play, were deadly serious about what we were doing, desperate to get a gig and a contract. We weren’t writers or photographers larking about to make some obscure arty point that nobody understood anyway. This was serious for us. Life or death.

Morley started by telling us that they were going on first. And we were saying, ‘Oh, fuck off, you’re not fucking pissing about and pissing off the judges before we come on; you can fuck off.’

‘No, we’re fucking going on.’

‘Fuck off are you.’

Ian was livid. One thing I remember about that night is that Ian was pissed and angry the
whole
night. Which was why he’d gone up and had a go at Tony Wilson, of course. I wasn’t there for any of that, but I know in Debbie’s book she says he first wrote Tony a note calling him a twat and all sorts, then went up to him to have a go at him for not putting us on TV. Tony was apparently pretty good about it, but I don’t think he knew much about us at that point. He said on the
Joy Division
film that we were next on his list, but I’m not so sure about that. I don’t think we were really on his radar then – not until that night, in fact.

Anyway. Our argument with the Negatives escalated. I was threatening Paul Morley, Ian was threatening Paul Morley, Barney was under a piano and Steve was hiding in the corner, and we finished by basically chasing the Negatives out, so they ended up not playing while we went on last, at about twenty past two in the morning, played about four or five songs and played our socks off. Being so angry gave us a bit of an edge – it always did – and it was probably one of our best performances. Well, we thought so. But we never heard from Mr Stiff, or Mr Chiswick, come to that.

Sounds writer Mick Wall called the band ‘Iggy imitators’, while Paul Morley of the
NME
, evidently putting aside the evening’s rivalry, wrote that ‘with patience they could develop strongly and make some testing, worthwhile music.’

Even more impressed was Granada TV’s Tony Wilson, who later said, ‘It took just twenty seconds of Joy Division’s set to convince me that this really would be a band worth investing in,’ as well as Rafter’s resident DJ, Rob
Gretton, who, after his experiences with the Panik, was looking for a new band to manage. That night he decided he’d found one.

‘[Joy Division] were blazing madmen,’ Gretton later said. ‘Best band I’ve ever seen. They sent a tingle up my spine. I was dancing all over [...] I went up telling them at the end, telling them how brilliant I thought it was [...] I went raving about them all next day.’

There were further developments. For some time Ian Curtis had been a regular face at the northern promotional offices of RCA Records, where he had befriended manager Derek Brandwood and his assistant, Richard Searling, a noted northern-soul DJ in his own right. Curtis had given Brandwood a copy of the
An Ideal for Living
EP; though Brandwood had been unimpressed, his teenage son had liked it. Not long afterwards, Brandwood and Searling were asked by the owner of the American Swan Records, Bernie Binnick, if they knew of an English punk band available to do a cover of the northern-soul track by N. F. Porter ‘Keep On Keepin’ On’ . . .

I think he’d come into contact with RCA thanks to a part-time job he’d had at Rare Records – which is quite funny, because when I’d worked at the Town Hall I bought records from there, so I’d probably bought some off him. Anyway, he’d started hanging around their offices in Piccadilly Plaza. The guys who worked there used to give him records: Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. Trouble was, the other record they gave him was this N.F. Porter song called ‘Keep On Keepin’ On’ that they wanted us to cover – but in a punk style. God knows why. I think they thought that RCA was missing out on the Manchester punk scene and maybe thought we were their way in. Where the northern soul connection came from I cannot imagine.

We listened to the record and hated it. We tried to learn it, but it changed into something completely different, which later became our song ‘Interzone’, but we turned up our noses at the idea of doing a cover. Then, at a meeting with the RCA guys and John Anderson, who was going to produce it, Ian and Steve were offered a deal. They started to hear things like, ‘advance of £20,000’, ‘go and record in Paris’ and ‘American tours’, which made them jump around, even making Steve squeal ‘Paris’ two octaves higher than normal, according to Ian. It all turned out to be a load of rubbish, though, because although we were impressed enough to take the deal we didn’t get an
advance and the studio wasn’t in Paris. It was Arrow Studios in Deansgate, Manchester, and on the day we arrived there was a voiceover guy doing an advert for Littlewoods lotteries that I can still remember now: ‘Littlewoods Lotteries. Things go better with Littlewoods . . .’ The guy kicked off proper when Ian walked in on him, tutting, ‘How unprofessional.’ We looked at each other – me, Barney, and Steve – and thought,
What have we got ourselves into here?

But it was too late to back out and we ended up recording an album with John Anderson – and what a turkey it was. Everything he suggested ended up sounding cabaret and we were getting more and more frustrated, especially Ian, of course, who’d been thinking,
RCA: Lou Reed, Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop
. . . only to hear it come out like the most awful un-rock-’n’-roll, anti-punk, most conventional sound you can imagine. Nothing like Iggy. Nothing like the Velvets. We’d be doing, say, ‘Ice Age’, and suggest having some wild feeding-back guitars on it, but John Anderson would scratch his chin and say, ‘I was thinking more along the lines of getting some girls in to do backing vocals . . .’ Which we all know is the kiss of death.

Holy shit. It was awful. We ended up recording eleven or twelve songs with him, all the ones that ended up on the album, which – despite the fact that we were hoping it would never see the light of day, please, God – has since been bootlegged to death. Then we left the studio with our tails between our legs, feeling worse than ever.

We couldn’t even get gigs. All the other groups in Manchester were trying to be a bit arty, like the Buzzcocks, but we weren’t. We were just dead working class and had no pretentions. Ian, I suppose you’d say, was the most pretentious of us, with his love of Burroughs and Kafka and whatever, but I think when other groups looked at us they saw a bunch of yobs. So we were getting pushed out; we felt like outsiders, and nobody wanted us to play.

Not long after that I remember being manager again. I phoned up the Elephant & Castle one day from work and in my best phone voice said, ‘Can I speak to the booker, please?’

And she went. ‘All right, darlin’, I’ll put you through to the booker.’ And then she went, ‘Hello, booker, Elephant & Castle.’

And I said, ‘Oh, hello there. My name’s Peter Hook. I play in a band called Joy Division and we’re trying to get support gigs in London . . .’

She stopped me. ‘What was that? What was your name?’

‘Joy Division.’

‘Listen darlin’,’ she said, ‘you’ll never get a gig in London with a name like Joy Division,’ and hung up.

I didn’t know what she meant but it didn’t matter. I stared at the phone thinking,
Typical. Shit album. Shit single. No gigs
. We were at a very low ebb.

All I can say is: thank fuck Rob Gretton came along.

Barney was out from work in one of the phone boxes by Spring Gardens Post Office, talking to Steve, when suddenly this guy yanked open the door. A big bloke with a beard, wearing glasses that he pushed up his nose before he spoke.

‘Fucking hell. You’re out of Joy Division, aren’t you?’

It was Rob.

‘I watched you at the Stiff /Chiswick night,’ he carried on. ‘I want to be your manager.’

Christ, did we need a manager. Barney hung up on Steve, chatted to Rob and invited him down to see us at T. J. Davidson’s.

Of course, Barney then promptly forgot and didn’t tell any of us, did he? We were standing around playing when Rob came in, perched himself on the edge of a step and sat there, nodding in time to the music.

Me, Steve and Ian were looking at each other, like,
Who’s this?
– with Barney off in his own little world, obviously. Then the song finished and there was an awkward silence as gradually we turned our attention to Rob, who looked at us, still nodding, as though he was pleased with what he’d heard. Until at last Barney said, ‘Oh, lads, I forget to mention. This is Rob Gretton. He’s the DJ at Rafters. He saw us play the Stiff/Chiswick night. He wants to be our manager.’

There was a collective sigh of relief. I wasn’t the only who hated managerial duties: Ian couldn’t do it; Steve couldn’t do it; Barney couldn’t do it; Terry certainly couldn’t do it, God bless him. But without one we were fucked, so this was like offering a straw to a drowning man. Plus, of course, we liked Rob straight away; he seemed to know what he was talking about, probably because he’d already managed the Panik and had a lot of band experience working with Rabid and Slaughter & the Dogs. And, even though we hated Slaughter & the Dogs, and Rob had had precisely zero success with the Panik and in truth had the same managerial experience we all had, he seemed to say the right things.

The first being: ‘This record’s shit.’ (Straight-talking would become his forte.)

He held up a copy of our
An Ideal for Living
EP.

‘Yeah,’ we mumbled.

He pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘What we need to do is get it remastered. We need to make it into a twelve-inch.’

He was already referring to us as ‘we’, which I liked. This was someone who was on our side.

Next he pointed at the picture of the Hitler Youth drummer. ‘We need to get rid of this Nazi artwork, too.’

Music to our ears and to Ian’s especially; he was desperate to recoup the money that he’d borrowed from the bank for his non-existent furniture – to get Debbie off his back as much anything.

So one of the first things Rob did was recover the masters and repress
An Ideal for Living
as a twelve-inch with a different cover, a picture of some scaffolding on King Street, solving both the sound and Nazi problems. Next he persuaded Tosh Ryan of Rabid Records, which was Slaughter & the Dogs’ label, to buy and distribute the rest of the seven-inches along with the twelve-inches. Paying us up front. The seven-inch ended up having an official release in June, the twelve-inch in October, and in one fell swoop Ian was paid off.

Now
that
is how you start off managing a group. We’d told him all about the Arrow Studios debacle and he cut a deal with John Anderson, offering him a grand for the master tapes. From then on any gig money we earned went into a pot managed by Rob, until we had enough to pay John Anderson and retrieve the tapes. (How, if we bought back the masters, did the record later appear as a bootleg, you might ask? That’s a very good question, but one I can’t answer here, because I’ve already given enough money to lawyers and have no desire to give them any more, thank you very much.)

By this time I’d sold the Jag and saved enough cash to buy an old petrol-blue Transit van. I was over the moon about that because I was sick of squeezing the gear in my car, or having to hire a van when we needed to take our own PA, which was a total ball-ache. I’d crashed a hired Bedford van when we did Pips. Only a little bit. It had a side hinge that jutted out from the door and I’d hit another car, taking the paint off and bending it a little bit. For that the rental place swiped my £20 deposit, but the rest of the group said it was my fault and refused to
chip in. So having my own van was a massive relief. From then on, I drove it and all the gear, Terry and Twinny came with me, while all the rest of the group went in Steve’s car. Having it made us more self-sufficient and meant that as long as Rob could get us gigs we could earn money. And he was good at getting us gigs.