Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (18 page)

Anyway, all that was still to come. During this particular session I was feeling pretty good about my contribution, but other than that I just kept myself to myself. You’ve got to remember that we were in the presence of some pretty big characters: Rob, Tony, Alan, Martin, so us lot just sat in the corner quaking.

After the session we did the sleeves. It was a double-seven-inch and we got paid to put them together. I think we went to Alan’s flat at Palatine Road. I seem to remember that it was in was the scruffy hippy kitchen that we did it. Tony didn’t have to pay us really, but me, Ian and Barney got 50p for every 100 that we folded and put in the sleeves, 5,000 altogether. Not for the last time, either. Later on, Factory released the Durutti Column’s debut,
The Return of the Durutti Column
, which came in a sandpaper sleeve, and I got paid for sticking bits of sandpaper on to 2,000 Durutti Column albums.

Inspired partly by Far Eastern record packaging and partly by the arty designs of Fast Product releases, Tony Wilson suggested a heat-sealed gatefold format for the
A Factory Sample
package. Peter Saville’s design echoed his poster for FAC 1, and the EP included a set of stickers, one to represent each band, with Joy Division being a sailor’s marionette. Its intricacies, however, made it more difficult to assemble than anticipated and a Christmas Eve release had to be postponed. Tony had scheduled
A Factory Sample
for release in December 1978 but Peter Saville missed the deadline for completing the artwork, pushing the release date back to January 1979. Wilson, however, was determined to give copies of the EP as Christmas presents to all the musicians who had played on it. So on Christmas Eve he photocopied Peter Saville’s design and made his own
sleeves with careful use of paper and glue, putting in the already pressed discs and delivering them himself, like a punk Santa Claus, to the homes of the twenty musicians, including Ian Curtis, Stephen Morris, Bernard Albrecht and Peter Hook.
A Factory Sample
eventually appeared in two batches in January and February.

In the meantime we resumed playing live, still in the North West and mainly in Manchester but elsewhere too. On 24 October we played the Fan Club at Brannigan’s in Leeds, a really nice club in a very dodgy area, the red-light district. It was a good gig; I didn’t think too much of it until not long after, when I answered a knock at the door one night and there stood two plain-clothes police officers on the doorstep, faces of stone.

‘Yeah?’ I said.

‘Can we speak to the owner of a blue transit, VRJ 242J,’ said one of them.

(And that again, by the way, is the
actual
registration number of the van. How I can still remember it after all these years is beyond me, but I do. When I told Anton that detail for
Control
he laughed; he thought I was mad.)

‘Oh, yeah, that’s me,’ I said. ‘I’m the owner.’ Thinking,
Aw, no, what’s this all about? Tax? Insurance? Speeding?

A lot worse than that, it would turn out.

‘Right, we need to talk to you.’

They came in. Still I thought it was motoring: I had a bent MOT on the van. I’d bought it for a tenner, couldn’t afford to fix it . . .

‘Right,’ he said, when we were all sat down. ‘We’ve had reports that your van has been seen in the red-light districts of Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds, Moss Side . . .’ He looked at me. ‘Want to tell me why that is, son?’

For a moment my mind went blank. All I could think was:
Yorkshire Ripper
. This was during the time they were searching for him. He preyed on prostitutes in Leeds, Bradford, Manchester . . .

‘Oh, hang on a minute,’ I said, ‘I’m in a group. I play bass in a group. Where you’re saying, they’re gigs we’ve played.’

They looked at each other, all doubtful like. ‘What’s your group called?’

‘Joy Division.’

‘Never heard of them.’

Probably Level 42 fans.

‘Really,’ I insisted. ‘I play bass and all the gigs that we play are in the red-light districts.’

‘Why’s that then?’

‘Well, we’re sort of a punk group and they’re the kind of places punk groups play.’

‘Can you prove that, then?’ he said.

‘What, that we’re a punk group?’

‘No, that your group has played in those places.’

‘Oh, yeah, yeah, of course,’ I said. ‘Our manager’s got all the dates written down. And proving it’s no problem. We’ve had punters – I mean, audience – watching, you know. And we’ve been reviewed and stuff.’

They seemed satisfied. ‘Well, in that case, we won’t ask you to come to the station or anything, but you must bear in mind that you’re appearing in all these areas where there have been Ripper killings, so you can consider yourself under investigation.’

I was nodding like a bastard, pleased to be off the hook, as it were. ‘Yeah, yeah. I’ll give you any help I can, anything you want.’

And he went, ‘Right, okay, we’ll leave it at that for now.’

Off they went. And, though I breathed a sigh of relief, I chuckled a bit about it, too.

The next day I got a call from Steve.

‘All right, Hooky. Have you had the police round?’ he said, voice trembling.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘They came and asked me about the red-light district and all that. Did they come to you?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘They came round and I panicked and they arrested me.’

Oh dear. He was so nervous they’d thought they had their man, dragged him off to the police station, cuffed him, locked him up and interviewed him. His mum had to come down and rescue him.

Oh, did we laugh. Not that it was particularly surprising. Poor old Steve. We used to call him Shakin’ Steve, he was that nervous all the time. The police must have taken one look at him and thought,
Got him. We’re looking promotion in the face.

In November we joined a tour with the Rezillos and the Undertones. A bit of an ill-fated tour, that one, because the Rezillos fell out following the first gig, after which it was just a matter of time before they split.

What’s more, the Undertones were all very young, about fourteen and fifteen, and this was the first time they’d been away from home so they were really, really homesick. Us, though, Joy Division? We were okay. I mean, we thought it was a bit of an odd billing because they were a pair of power-pop bands and we were . . . what we were. But we were pleased to play, to get the gigs, to do the travelling. Plus we got to stay in hotels and B&Bs for the first time, which was pretty exciting. First time we’d stayed away from home for a gig.

But then of course the Rezillos had this big bust-up. We played Brunel the next night and I remember that well for two reasons. Firstly because the Rezillos singer, Faye, got changed in front of us and our eyes were on stalks as we tried desperately not to look. She probably didn’t have much choice, it being a shared dressing room and all, and being in a band I’m sure she was quite used to decking off in front of the other guys, but even so we were shocked. The second reason was that the crowd wouldn’t stop spitting. There was a gap between the stage and the crowd, like a no-man’s land, and every now and then some twat would run into the space and gob at Ian as we were playing. So I started twatting them with my bass. It had this hook on top of the headstock, the Hondo, and every time one of these little fuckers darted through the crowd to gob at Ian I swiped him in the ear with the top of the bass. I got about ten of them that way, little bastards. There was a speaker stack in the way so they couldn’t see me when they came running in. Got a nice surprise.

Even so, there were too many, and we called it a day after seven numbers and fucked off. It’s horrible, spitting. I remember one awful night where the Buzzcocks were getting spat at at the Electric Circus and it was happening so much that Pete Shelley ended a song early.

‘Stop the gig, stop the gig, stop the gig,’ he squealed. ‘Listen, right, if
you lot don’t stop spitting, we’re not going to play.’ The crowd stopped. It lasted for about three seconds before he was showered in the biggest rain of spit I’ve ever seen in my life. Everybody just spat at him all at once – and he shrugged and played on. Should have walked off. That was how Joe Strummer got hepatitis, from swallowing someone’s spit. Disgusting.

Anyway, a couple of the gigs were cancelled because the Rezillos had walked off the tour. Then when we turned up to the Locarno in Bristol to play we were told that
we
were off the tour. We’d done the sound-check only to be suddenly told that they’d brought Chelsea in instead, and John Otway. Fuck me, we had a massive row with them. Gene October, Chelsea’s singer, was such a twat and was being so fucking arrogant that Ian wanted to kill him, to bottle him. Rob was freaking, too. It went the way all fights between gobby Cockneys and gobby Mancs go:

‘You fucking Manc bastards, I’ll have you.’

‘You bunch of Cockney twats. We’ll fucking do you.’

Ian started throwing punches, and the Chelsea guys were hitting back. We were just so fucked off because we really wanted to play. I mean, I still don’t know why the Rezillos leaving the tour meant that we had to leave the tour, too; why didn’t they just put us and the Undertones on? But in the end we were actually physically ejected, chased out of the building.

It was not long after that they we had our first gig in London, at the Hope & Anchor. Bernard’s sleeping bag made another appearance. That night we discovered that there was something wrong with Ian. Something really wrong.

First off, it was a really big thing for us to play London. We were dead excited and nervous about doing it, as though the whole of London would be there to look at us. In reality the gig was in the basement of the pub. The Hope & Anchor is a legendary venue, don’t get me wrong, but still: it was hardly the Marquee. It was a nightmare journey into London to get there. The others hadn’t turned up, so it was left to me and Twinny to unload and set up the gear. We had to load it down the beer chute into the basement, which was cold and damp, pretty horrible, if I’m honest. Meanwhile, the rest of them – Steve, Ian, Bernard, Rob and I think Gillian was there, too – had been lost because Steve was a rotten driver, a terrible driver. He collects tanks these days,
of course, and all I can say is that I hope he never takes them for a spin because he is the world’s worst. He held some kind of Macclesfield record for having the most driving lessons and tests. Something like 400 driving lessons and twenty-five tests. He was so nervous. Insisted on driving with a cigarette in his hand so he’d only ever have one hand on the wheel.

‘Put both hands on the wheel!’ they’d scream. Whenever he followed the van in the Cortina he’d always drive way too close. So close that I’d have to stop and say to him, ‘Steve, listen, you’re driving too close, mate; you’ve got to back off, ‘cause if I have to brake you’re going to kill us all!’

Also, we had this sort of flimsy ‘no girlfriend’ rule, one of Rob’s ideas: it was okay to bring your girlfriend along to a gig in Manchester but not to away gigs. There wasn’t any sleazy reason for it; it was just logistics, really. You’ve got your band, your crew, your gear. There isn’t really the room for girlfriends; it made sense. But not to Steve – Steve would always bring his girlfriend along. First it was Stephanie, and because there was no room for her she’d have to sit on someone’s knee all the way to Sheffield or Aberdeen or wherever. Then, of course, when he started going out with Gillian he began taking her along to every gig too.

I can’t say for sure whether she was with him that night. What I do remember is them all turning up expecting to get warm, then coming into the basement of the Hope & Anchor and their faces falling when they discovered that it was freezing down there. This was especially bad news for Bernard, of course, who had the flu. We had to literally drag him from his sick bed just so he could make our first big London gig, only to find that it was in this cold basement – no heaters or radiators. Probably didn’t have a toilet either. Honestly, kids in bands these days, they don’t know they’re born. (And yes: I know I sound like an old fart but fuck it, it’s my book.) They don’t. With their sound-men and stage managers, and over-proud parents, poncing in and expecting everything laid out for them. You go to a gig now, like at the Academy or something, and it’s got toilets with paper in them, and central heating and everyone gets a rider and coffee and clean towels and all that. Not in 1978, you didn’t. Most gigs were like that one: complete chaos: ‘There’s the stage; set up and shut up.’

Most times you managed to muddle on through and a mixture of good luck, better songs and the love of it all magically creating a great
gig. But we didn’t have luck on our side that night; we were fresh out of the love of it all and even the songs sounded diabolical and there was no fucker there. I tell a lie: there were twenty people there. Got us our first bad review, too: ‘Joy Division were grim but I grinned.’ Cheeky bastard. Afterwards I did the sums: it had cost us £28.50 in petrol to do the gig and we’d earned £27.50 from the door, so we’d lost a quid doing it. When it was all over we packed up our stuff and drove home.

We were driving down the motorway together, me checking in my rear-view mirror occasionally. Obviously I’d warned Steve to back off because he was scaring the shit out of me; and I was pleased to see that he was taking notice at last when all of a sudden they disappeared. My heart sinking, I pulled over on the hard shoulder and we waited – and waited.

Don’t forget that in those days there was no traffic. You could be stopped on the hard shoulder of the M1 for an hour and not see another car. So we sat there in the freezing cold. We couldn’t keep the heater running, of course, because it was a waste of petrol, so we just shivered in the cab of the van, rubbing our hands together to keep warm, moaning about them. Like, maybe they’d broken down. Maybe they’d stopped for something to eat. It would be just like them to stop off for a fry-up. But then again, no. Bernard, the last I saw of him, had looked like something out of
Night of the Living Dead
, he was that full of the flu. They were potless anyway, plus I hadn’t seen any services open along the way. No, they couldn’t have stopped.