Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (23 page)

His bag was winding people up. I remember he made Bernard sing ‘Cries & Whispers’ by New Order forty-three times. He wanted a complete take and if there was one error, or what Martin
thought
was an error, he made Bernard do it again. Barney was totally pissed off with it all, and quite rightly so, but Martin fed off that. You could see the look in his eyes, like,
This’ll get him.
He was looking for that spark, something intangible. But to him always a catalytic spark.

Did he get it? Well, it would be great if this particular anecdote ended with Bernard doing the performance of his life and ‘Cries & Whispers’ becoming one of our greatest songs, but it doesn’t because we told Martin to fuck off and stormed out. So no, he didn’t get it. What he got was band and producer at each other’s throats, which was all part of his divide-and-conquer ethic. And if you were looking for any support from Chris Nagle you might as well forget it: Martin’s big thing was that the group should do their bit and then piss off, and Chris was very much his right-hand man on that. Even though he was our age he always took Martin’s side against the group and the pair of them would visibly gang up on you, sniggering together like schoolgirls if you suggested anything.

I’d go, ‘Can we turn up the high-hat, Martin, please?’ and the pair of them would look at each other and dissolve into giggles.

I’d be like, ‘What’s so fucking funny about that? What’s so fucking funny about turning up the high-hat?’ But the pair of them would sit there sniggering like bastards. Infuriating.

If that failed they would try to freeze us out. They sat at the desk in the middle of the room, where it was warm, while we had to sit at the back under the air-conditioning that they’d jammed on full to get rid of us. Barney had to produce the sleeping bag yet again. It wouldn’t have been so bad if 10CC had kept the heating on at night, the tight bastards. But you literally had icicles hanging off your nose.

When we’d finished recording we had to decide what songs were going on the album and in what order. Looking back now at the tracks we recorded, I’d say that ‘Exercise One’, ‘Only Mistake’, ‘They Walked in Line’ and ‘The Kill’ were a bit punkier than the tracks we ended up picking, and maybe didn’t fit in with the album so well. ‘Exercise One’ is the best one. ‘Only Mistake’ is a good song as well. ‘They Walked in Line’ and ‘The Kill’ are a bit too punky, a bit throwaway.

Once we’d decided what was going to make the cut, Martin tuned it so that each song was in a sympathetic key, so it didn’t jar but instead sounds like a smooth, ear-pleasing progression rather than a harsh transition, like harmonic mixing – so ‘Disorder’ into ‘Day of the Lords’ was in tune and so on and so on. Martin introduced us to all that. Very, very clever.

Then
we could hear it, of course.

I can’t remember if we were there for the mixing. Maybe not. As I said, Martin hated us hanging around when we weren’t playing, getting on his nerves. ‘Get these fucking musicians out of here,’ he’d scream.

He used to say ‘musicians’ like it was a swear word. What difference it would have made to the finished article if we’d been sitting on his shoulder while he mixed it I couldn’t say. Back then we didn’t know enough about the process to have much of an opinion. All we saw was him pressing buttons. He could have been releasing squadrons of bats for all we knew. So whether we were there or not, Martin mixed
Unknown Pleasures
his way.

Ian and Steve loved it. Me and Barney hated it. We thought it was too weak. We wanted it to be miles heavier. We wanted it to go
RARRGH!
And instead it went
ptish.
All the things I now love about the album – the spacey, echoey ambient sound of it – were all the things I hated about it when I first heard it.

I was properly upset about it, too. The kind of upset you get when you’re in the minority – because when Tony and Rob heard it they loved it as well, so it was fait accompli, mate. That was the end of it.

For me it was almost like the
An Ideal for Living
moment, when I got the record home and put it on only to hear that it was absolutely shit.
Unknown Pleasures
sort of had the same effect. To make us sound so . . . weedy. It made me feel sick.
Oh my God, he’s taken all the guts out of it. All the balls. How could he do that?

Now, of course, I can see the error of my ways. Now I can see that
what Martin gave us, which was the greatest gift any producer can give any band. He gave us timelessness. Because
Unknown Pleasures
is just one of those things: it’s a truly ageless album. Think of the millions of albums influenced by
Unknown Pleasures
that
have
aged, while
Unknown Pleasures
hasn’t. That was his gift to us. We gave him the brilliant songs and he put them in little capsules so they’d stay brilliant forever.

Bernard had of course done a great job on the
An Ideal for Living
cover. And I’m not being sarcastic: I really think he did. He was always on the lookout for images to put on our stuff; and looking through a book,
The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy
, he saw a diagram of a pulsar, showed it to Peter Saville and that was it. Bernard doesn’t get nearly enough credit for that, because he couldn’t have made a better choice: that image is now forever associated with Joy Division and
Unknown Pleasures
the record. Talking of which, I can’t remember who came up with the title. Ian again? Either way Peter went off, applied his magic and turned it into
Unknown Pleasures
, putting all his great little touches on it: the textured paper, the text on the reverse and the light and shade of having the outer sleeve black and the inner sleeve white. To be honest, I wasn’t that interested in the art. I was just pleased that they didn’t intend to feature the band. We’d seen too many punk bands standing there scowling in black and white, their name sprayed on the wall behind them. We were all behind playing down the personality. Our image was a kind of anti-image, about anonymity and being chilly and grey and buttoned-up against the cold. In lots of our pictures we’re hunched up or have our backs turned, which was a mixture of being cold and not giving a fuck about the whole business of image, really. We didn’t want it to be about us. We certainly didn’t want it to be about our looks, ‘cause we were such a bunch of ugly bastards. We wanted it all to be about the music.

It was the same with journalists. Right from the early days Rob had been dead against us giving interviews – especially me and Bernard, because we just used to sit there and say stupid things. Taking the piss.

Rob’s response was, ‘Right, you two. You don’t speak. At all. Just sit there and look menacing.’ He didn’t do it to create a mystique around the band but because he thought we were a couple of cretins. The result was that it created a mystique around the band. Absolute genius.

Anyway, we finished the album in April and, despite me and Barney
protesting that we wanted to sound like the Sex Pistols, the master went off to the pressing plant and they pressed 10,000 of them.

One night Rob phoned me up and said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to go and pick the record up.’

‘Fucking hell,’ I said, ‘Ten thousand of them. Isn’t anybody else coming?’

‘No, just me and you.’

I hired a van from Salford Van Hire and had to tell them I was moving house (they had a sign on the wall refusing to hire to ‘musicians, hawkers and gypsies’). Then we drove down to London to pick up the records from the plant. Loading the van took an age then we drove them back up to Manchester, thinking the axle was going to snap any second, taking it slow so we didn’t fuck up the van. At Manchester we went straight to Palatine Road and started handballing them up the three flights of stairs to Alan’s flat. Margox was there. That’s Margi Clarke, the actress out of
Letter To Brezhnev
and
Corrie
, of course, but back then she was called Margox and she did bits of singing and TV presenting and she was there at 86a with Alan’s flatmate.

This was about 7pm and she said, ‘Oh, what you got there, love? Is this your record, like? Can I have one?’ We ignored her and they disappeared off into the bedroom. Sure enough, as we loaded the records in we did it to a background noise of them having very noisy orgasms, thinking,
Fucking hell, could this be any fucking worse?

She came floating out much later, when me and Rob were sitting there dripping in sweat from having carried 10,000 copies of
Unknown Pleasures
up the stairs.

‘Can I have a record?’ she said.

Seems a bit mean now, but it was just the culmination of a bad day; I’m ashamed to say that Rob told her to fuck right off again.

Quite funny, really, because at our very next gig, at Eric’s in May, who should be there as our support? Only Margox again. She did this act where she sang over other people’s records – Kraftwerk, Sex Pistols and stuff – just shrieking over the top of them. Absolutely awful, it was, and I’m sure she’d be the first to agree. Still, we loved her. How can you not love Margi Clarke? That really earthy, rude character you see on screen is like a toned-down version of the real one. What you see is what you get there, let me tell you. She is wonderful. So when we were in the dressing room before the show, and Twinny winked at us before
saying to her, ‘Show us your tits, love,’ I don’t know why we were surprised when she went, ‘Here y’go, la,’ lifted up her top and showed us them in all their glory.

We went bright red and stayed bright red when she didn’t put them away. Just waited until we were at maximum discomfort, our faces burning so hot you could fry eggs on them and silently plotting revenge on Twinny and his big mouth, until at last she put us out of our misery, saying, ‘That taught you a lesson, lads?’

‘Yes,’ we mumbled like naughty school boys.

Top down, she left the room pissing herself laughing. She’d played us at our own game and won hands down. She was wild – a great girl – and I was chuffed when she started on
Coronation Street
years later. Like I say, it’s one of those programmes that I always feel is inextricably linked with my life, right from listening to the theme tune at the top of the stairs with our Chris, to Margi Clarke, and then to Tony Wilson telling us how he’d started its most famous siren, Pat Phoenix, on drugs. He’d got her into dope, or so he said, and once she was into it she wouldn’t leave him alone. She became a proper spliff-head.

‘Where’s that Tony Wilson with my drugs?’ she used to scream in the office. ‘Come on, where is he? Tony! Where’s my fucking drugs?’ Tony would be hiding under the desk to try to get away from her. He’d created a monster. It’s funny because I remember, just before I started the group, being in Kendal’s department store in town and I looked up and she was there, Elsie Tanner, and I went, ‘Oh, Hiya,’ and she glared at me like looks could kill and went, ‘Oh, fuck off, will you?’ and stormed past. My first brush with celebrity.

One of Manchester’s most famous sirens telling me to fuck right off. Two years later Margi Clarke telling me to fuck off too – the Peter Hook curse of
Coronation Street.

Unknown Pleasures
was released to great critical acclaim, with the
NME
hailing at as an ‘English rock masterwork’ and
Melody Maker
as one of the year’s best debuts. Though initial sales failed to match the acclaim, word began to spread and Factory soon sold around 15,000, earning the label between £40,000 and £50,000 profit inside six months.

Our next job was a session for Piccadilly Radio, where we recorded our first version of ‘Atmosphere’, called ‘Chance’ at that point, along with ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, which went on to become the opening track on the next album,
Closer
, except in a Hannett slowed-down stripped-down, effect-heavy version.

To be honest, I always preferred it sounding like the version we did first – or better still when we did it live. ‘Chance’, on the other hand, improved a lot when we re-recorded it. The version we recorded during the session had an organ on it, an old one that Barney had borrowed from his gran. She’d bought it from Woolworths in the 1950s and it was made of old, hard plastic that had gone brittle by the time we got our hands on it. Had a wild sound, though. We liked it straight away, thought it sounded immense and would be great on ‘Chance’. Pleased with the way it sounded, we decided to play the song at our next gig, at the F Club in Leeds with the Durutti Column, and took the organ along. There was no case for it but we stowed it on top of the gear, until Vini came along, put his guitar on top of the stack and knocked the Woolies organ off. All that brittle plastic just shattered when it hit the floor. Gutted. We loved that organ.

Ah well, onward and upward.
Unknown Pleasures
came out in June and got fantastic reviews. The distribution wasn’t great, of course – that’s what you get for being independent – but our stock was rising; we were in demand. We became like a touring machine.

Me, Bernard and Steve found it exhausting juggling the late nights with work, and we weren’t married. For us, home was a sanctuary. For Ian, once he got out of Steve’s Cortina at night, he was stepping straight
into another world of problems: a wife who was uncertain about how she fitted into her husband’s new life, and who felt excluded from it, a victim of Rob’s no-girlfriends policy. An unhappy wife, in other words. And, of cour se, a new baby . . .

Natalie had been born while we were recording
Unknown Pleasures
, and the fact that I can remember so little about it says less for my memory and more for the fact that Ian hardly mentioned it. There was no big announcement. No session down the pub to wet the baby’s head. I don’t think he would have said anything at all apart from the fact that he’d fainted at the sight of Debbie giving birth, falling, splitting his head open and leaving Debbie to give birth alone while the nurses looked after him. We asked him more about the cut. In
Touching from a Distance
Debbie says that Ian had had a fit and cut his head, so what the truth of the matter is I’m not completely sure. All I know is that’s how we found out Ian had become a dad.