Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (28 page)

The release of the ‘Transmission’ seven-inch in October had proved to be a disappointment for Tony Wilson, who had hoped that its chorus of ‘Dance, dance, dance to the radio’ would win it radio airplay. Plans to hire a radio plugger were shelved at the insistence of Rob Gretton and Martin Hannett,
who felt that to promote the single went against the Factory ethos. As a result, and despite critical acclaim, just 3,000 of the 10,000 copies ordered by Wilson were sold. Rob Gretton was to orchestrate the band’s next act of commercial defiance, striking a deal with French label Sordide Sentimental. Set up in France in 1978 by Jean-Pierre Turmel and Yves Von Bontee, it had piqued his interest with a superbly packaged release of Throbbing Gristle’s ‘We Hate You (Little Girls)’, and a deal was made to release two Joy Division songs in similar fashion: ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Dead Souls’, produced by Martin Hannett during sessions at Cargo in October. Finally released in March 1980, The Licht und Blindheit EP was limited to just 1,578 copies, mail order only, with most fans having to content themselves with taping it from the John Peel programme.

The tracks that Throbbing Gristle put out on Sordide Sentimental were never going anywhere else. I mean, they were harsh even by the standards of Throbbing Gristle. Whenever I put that EP on my cat used to run out of the room. Us? We put two of our best songs on it. On a limited edition that we never even got any money for. The run was 1,578 copies; I found out years later that 1578 was also the last date the French beat the English in a war.

Having said that, it didn’t bother us at the time – this came during a period when we were continually writing great songs, so it didn’t seem like such a big deal, to be honest. And, looking at it in terms of the whole Joy Division story, well, it’s just ‘us’ isn’t it? That special attitude championed by Rob and accepted by Tony that was either total naivety, utter stupidity, incredible foresight or a weird mix of all three. I honestly don’t know. I mean, people said we were mad at the time – other bands and their managers, I mean. But Rob loved it. He loved being bloody-minded and contrary and he liked nothing better than winding up Tony.

‘Atmosphere’ was originally written in two halves. The bass and drums was one idea – me and Steve came up with it together. The vocals and the keyboards was another idea. We’d been working on them separately, just tinkering with them, really, then put them together and got the song that we called ‘Chance’, featuring our Woolies organ borrowed from Barney’s gran.

It would be a few years yet before we got overdrawn at the riff bank. This was the time, after all, that we also wrote ‘Love Will Tear Us
Apart’ and ended up recording it for the first time as part of a second John Peel session in November. It was a song we’d written during rehearsals at TJ’s. I had the riff, Steve built the drum part and Ian mumbled some words then said he was going to go home and write some lyrics for it, which he did, using the bass riff as the melody for the chorus. But Christ, if he’d written that song about me I’d have been heartbroken. I’m not sure who it was written about. I never asked. But whoever it was deserves all of his money just for that.

Still with the Buzzcocks tour, we were travelling further afield in the UK and Ian began having more fits. He had a really bad one in Bournemouth. He was so tired by the time we got there. We all were, of course – absolutely knackered – but the rest of us weren’t on heavy medication. We didn’t have a wife and a baby, and our affairs of the heart weren’t quite so complicated.

After a gig in Guildford the night before, Rob had shaved the band’s hair with clippers. Ian, Bernard and Steve got sheared; only I got away with it. We were staying at a B&B where Bernard had to go and sleep in the bathroom to get away from Rob’s snoring – the start of a regular habit for him – there was a lot more booze involved and it was all a bit of a riot one way or another. The upshot being that by the time we reached Bournemouth we were shattered – especially Ian. Most of the seizures he had occurred towards the end of gigs but this one was near the beginning of the show, which we had to stop. It lasted about an hour and a half, with me and Rob taking turns holding him down in the dressing room; once again with me holding his tongue in his mouth to stop him swallowing it. Christ, it was scary.

He came round and was looking at us, his eyes all glassy.

‘Ian,’ I said to him, ‘Can you hear me, mate? We’re going to have to get you to the hospital.’ He shook his head: he understood me all right but he didn’t want to go to the hospital. Never did; didn’t want to be a bother. That was him all over.

‘Look, Ian, mate; it’s not right; you’ve been fitting too long. We’re taking you whether you like it or not.’

He was still dead reluctant to go and in a funny sort of way he was right. You take a guy who’s just had an epileptic fit to casualty and the nurse looks at you like you’ve just dropped in from Venus. And that’s exactly what happened when we’d bundled Ian into the car, got him to the nearest hospital and waited hours for our turn to be seen.

They did at least have the good grace to take him into a consulting
room, while we hung about in the waiting room. After a while he came out. A bit pale, bit downcast. Otherwise okay.

‘You all right, Ian?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m okay. Don’t worry about it.’

He went back to the gig, where the Buzzcocks had only just come on, and there was no sign of Twinny anywhere. After searching for a while I found him in a cupboard, all curled up in a ball like he was hiding from something.

‘What the fuck are you doing in here?’ I said.

‘He’s possessed by the devil, that twat.’

‘Get up, you soft bastard,’ I said, dragging him out. ‘Stop fucking around. Go and see him. He’s back to normal now.’

Whatever ‘normal’ was. For Ian ‘normal’ was getting hardly any rest, eating shit food, getting pissed, travelling all the time, driving from city to city. The precise opposite of everything he should have been doing. I look back and keep seeing where we should have stopped. It’s the part of doing this book that’s the hardest. Writing it all down, I can pinpoint the moments where we should have said ‘enough is enough’ – because now they seem so obvious. But at the time he just carried on and so did we. Selfishness, stupidity, wilful ignorance and a refusal to accept what was going on right in front of our noses – we were all guilty of it, even Ian. Because this was what we’d worked and waited for. All that freezing in TJ’s and fighting with the Drones and feeling ignored and overlooked was paying off at last. I wish sometimes I could tell the younger me, ‘Slow down, mate, what’s the big hurry? You’ve got another thirty or forty years of this,’ knowing that the twenty-two-year-old me would curl his lip and tell the old me to fuck off, because when you’re twenty-two it feels like if you don’t seize the moment then it’ll be gone in a puff of smoke.

Even so, I find it mind-boggling that someone didn’t slap Rob Gretton and the rest of us and drag Ian off home to bed. But nobody did. Things just got more and more manic. On the Buzzcocks tour the practical jokes continued. Unsuspecting victims would open doors and get wastepaper bins of rubbish or water dumped on their heads. Or they’d sit in chairs we’d balanced on Coke cans so they’d topple over.

Of course there were times it got right out of hand. One night, around about the time of fireworks night, the whole lot of us – me,
Terry, Dave Pils, Rob and Steve – burst in on Ian and Barney, who were with a couple of girls in a hotel room, Barney in one bed, Ian in the other. Dave lit a couple of bangers and threw them into the room, where one of them landed on Barney’s shirt and set it on fire.

Barney went berserk – absolutely wild. After he’d put the shirt out, he was calling us all sorts and shouting at us to fuck off and waving his burnt shirt around. In return we were giving him the Vs and telling him he could fuck off and that he deserved it (although I’m not sure he did, actually; it was probably jealousy on our part, but there you go). Ian thought it was hilarious and these two girls, both completely naked, were absolutely terrified, poor things, the room suddenly full of Northerners chucking fireworks around, setting clothes alight and swearing at each other. Hardly the erotic feast they might have been hoping for.

We would have spent all night screaming at each other had the hotel porter not arrived and kicked off. As he was shouting at us, Barney stormed out of the room, giving it all, ‘Right, you fuckers, I’ll show you,’ as a parting shot, and we were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, fuck off,’ as he went.

Everything calmed down. Most of us went to the bar for a drink, gave the girls a bit of privacy at last, and as we were sitting there Barney came in, still raging.

‘Where’ve you been?’ we said.

‘You’ll see,’ he was saying. ‘You’ll fucking see, you bunch of bastards.’

We were like, ‘Fuck off, twatto,’ finishing our drinks. Only to discover the following morning that the stupid twat had let all four tyres down on the car.

I was like, ‘What you do that for?’

‘You burnt my fucking shirt.’

‘But you’ve japed yourself. You have to travel in that car as well, you stupid twat.’

Of course it took us hours to get the four tyres pumped up. We had to buy a foot pump then take it in turns. We were all sweating like bastards, including Barney.

A lot of the japes took place between us and the Buzzcocks and their crew, and in the run-up to the last gig of the tour, which was at the Rainbow at Finsbury Park, their guys were telling us that they were going to spring something really big on us, really nasty, for our last night.

‘Oh, we’re going to get you. We’re going to get you,’ they were saying. ‘When you’re on stage, mate, mid-performance. We got something very special in mind for you.’

But fuck ‘em: they were messing with the kings and straight away we formed a council of war to concoct our retaliation. What we came up with involved the purchase of twelve live mice – we wanted rats but we couldn’t afford them – ten pounds of live maggots, ten cans of shaving foam and five dozen eggs. That was all we could afford. A fortune was spent on this jape, but it was going to be worth it.

The plan was to get the Buzzcocks with the maggots during their performance. They’d think that was all we had to offer, but in the meantime we’d have put the live mice inside their tour bus and used the shaving foam on the doors and windows. They’d deal with the shaving foam, board the bus, see the mice, run screaming off the bus and we’d egg as they came out. Brilliant. We were as good as inventing japes as we were at writing songs.

So it got to the gig. Even though we knew we had something lined up we were still worried about what they’d do to us. Their crew were all sniggering. We’d been threatened with the jape to end them all. All week they’d been leading up to this. What would they have come up with? What horrors lay in store for us?

They put some talcum powder on the snare drum.

That was it. That was the full extent of their world-beating jape. A bit of talcum powder on the snare drum. I didn’t even notice at the time. As we were coming off I said to Steve, ‘What’s happened to the Buzzcocks’ jape, then?’ and Steve told me that they’d put a bit of talc on his snare drum and when he’d hit it a little cloud had come up. That was it.

What a bunch. Oh dear: our response was going to look a bit on the disproportionate side. Still, more fools them for doing such a lame joke, we thought, and seeing them chortling away, thinking they’d been dead funny with their talc-on-the-snare-drum trick, just made us even more determined to set about our reply as planned. We waited until they came on and launched phase one of the plan: the maggots.

Ten pounds of them, we had. That’s a lot of maggots. That’s five bags of sugar’s worth of maggots. Towards the end of their set, as they started playing ‘Boredom’, we livened things up by creeping up behind the crew with our bags: a couple of bags of maggots each, emptying
them first on to the flight cases where the Buzzcocks’ crew sat to watch the set, then on to the Buzzcocks’ backdrop, which the maggots began crawling up, just as we’d hoped they would, and then on to the fold-back desk.

Barely holding it together we retreated to watch the mayhem from a safe distance, watching the maggots advance. The crew noticed something first. A tide of maggots had made its way from the flight cases up the backs of the crew, then into their hair. We watched as first one then another started to scratch and a horrible realization dawned on them. The next wave of maggots had by now worked their way up the backdrop and were falling on the Buzzcocks’ drummer, John Maher. Now the guys on the fold-back desk were running around screaming. So were the rest of the crew. John Maher finished ‘Boredom’ in a shower of maggots and the band came off, furious with us.

That was it, they thought. Jape over. How wrong they were. They had two buses outside, one for the band and their girlfriends and another one for the crew. We’d prised open the windows, dropped in the mice, coated all the door handles in shaving foam then returned to the Rainbow for an end-of-tour party.

Sarge let us into the dressing room. At last. Allowed inside the sacred dressing room. And what a riot that turned into, everybody pissed. Their lot were laughing about the talc on the snare drum – ho ho, what a funny jape – and we were laughing about the maggots, letting them think that was the end of it but secretly anticipating the carnage we’d prepared for when they got to their buses.

One food fight later and it was time to leave, so we scarpered out quick and piled into Steve’s Cortina, parking up beneath an underpass or railway bridge or something, oblique to where the coaches were and across the road, each coach primed with six live mice in it and the windows and door handles coated with shaving cream.

So we watched . . . And out came the Buzzcocks and their girlfriends and, in hysterics, we then watched them cursing us and wiping off the shaving cream. They saw us over the road and started screaming at us, but didn’t even bother trying to get us – we’d have been out of there while they were still doing the Green Cross Code. We cradled our eggs as we watched them clean off the last bits of foam and board the bus, then we waited for them to come running out as soon as they saw the mice.