Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (5 page)

All my friends moved to Ellor Street, which was all high-rise seventies flats and a new shopping precinct all built out of concrete. It was fucking rotten, horrible, like a concrete wasteland. And this was when it first opened.

So, my mother, God rest her soul, wouldn’t move there. Me and our kid were gutted because all of our mates had moved but she wouldn’t budge, not even when the bulldozers moved in and we were the pretty much the last house standing in Ordsall – just ours and an empty one either side to prop it up. They kept offering her places in Ellor Street to try to get rid of us, but she wouldn’t go into a flat. She wouldn’t have it. All the flats they showed her she said were shitholes. The whole of Ellor Street she said was a shithole. Mind you, she was right: it was a shithole. But all my mates lived in that shithole and I wanted to live there too. I remember persuading her to at least have a look at one flat; we drove to see it but on the wall at the entrance to the flats there was sprayed the legend ‘Glasgow Rangers will die tonite!’ I don’t know if it was the bad spelling that most offended her but she made Bill turn straight round and she never went back.

We lived like that for about six months, on our own like the weird family in a surreal film. The buses had stopped running – there was no traffic at all. To get anywhere we had to walk across a wasteland that had once been full of houses. Until at last my mum got an offer to relocate to another overspill area, Little Hulton. They’d offered her a three-bedroomed house in Brookhurst Lane with its own gardens, front and back,
and
an inside toilet. Didn’t have heating, mind, but otherwise it was fantastic and she took it on the spot.

So we moved to Little Hulton, and all my mates were in Salford. Twenty miles, which seemed a long way at seventeen with no car. Nightmare. This was when I started spending a lot of time at Barney’s, because getting back to Little Hulton was so difficult. Most weekends I’d get the bus to his in Broughton on a Friday after work. Then we’d hang around in Pips or Man Alive in town, getting pissed and trying to chat up girls even though we were useless. We’d sober up all Saturday and go out again that night, to Tiffany’s, Rotters or Rowntrees Sound, again in town, getting pissed and trying to chat up girls, back to his house again, me sleeping on the floor. We’d laze around all Sunday morning, fuck around in the afternoon, and then I’d get the last bus home.

It’s not for me to talk about Barney’s situation, but let’s just say that for one reason or another it wasn’t your average home life. He was quite indulged by his mum and dad. They didn’t exactly have pots of money but anything he wanted, he got – or seemed to: scooter, clothes, later an electric guitar, amp, etc.

The only room in the house that had any character was his. With his posters on the wall and his stuff lying around it looked like a proper lived-in room, whereas the rest of the house was strangely neat and tidy. No newspapers hanging around, the telly never on – no, well,
life
to it, really – and Barney would always eat on his own or in the bath. He was forever eating then falling asleep in the bath and waking up to find bits of his dinner floating around him. ‘I fucking fell asleep again,’ he’d moan. ‘Fucking dinner ended up in the bath.’ We would also spend a lot of time across the canal at his gran and granddad’s, the Sumners; they were lovely and waited on him hand and foot.

I was twenty, then, in early 1976, not long before the Sex Pistols came to Manchester for the first time.

I’d started getting interested in pop music around twelve or thirteen, when, like every other kid back in those days, I was glued to
Top of the Pops
every week. Then somebody gave me a reel-to-reel tape recorder that already had a load of music on it, and I used to listen to that over and over again – stuff like ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’
.
Still, though, nothing could eclipse
Top of the Pops
, which I lived for. You forget now, what with MTV, YouTube, and the fact that music’s shovelled into your ears in every shop, restaurant and supermarket, but back then
Top of the Pops
was the only way you could get to see pop music being performed. For a kid from Salford it was mind-blowing to see Deep Purple doing ‘Black Night’, Sabbath ripping through ‘Paranoid’, Family doing ‘The Weavers Answer’, Marc Bolan, Bowie... Like having a window on a wonderful other world, even if they were miming. And it annoyed your parents.

As I got older I became a skinhead and from that discovered reggae: the Upsetters, the Pioneers, Desmond Dekker, Dave & Ansel Collins. It wasn’t until the fourth year that I got my first record player, though, when I bought one from Martin Gresty, who needed some quick cash. I don’t think his mum even knew he was selling her Dansette, to be honest, but I gave him eleven quid for it, which was all the money I had and a fortune in those days. Of course that meant I couldn’t afford to buy any records, which my mother thought was hilarious. So I nicked some. There was a shop on Langworthy Road that used to have old ex-jukebox singles for sale in a box outside and I swiped a couple sight unseen, just to have something to play on my Dansette. When I got round the corner to take a look at my haul I wasn’t exactly overjoyed: ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town’ by Kenny Rogers and ‘The Green Manalishi’ by Fleetwood Mac. I’d never heard of either. Still, at least I finally had something to listen to. Or so I thought. Turned out I couldn’t play them – being ex-jukebox they had no middles – and it took me another week to steal one! Years later I appeared on that BBC programme
The One Show
, talking about the first record I ever bought: I
told them it was ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town’; I didn’t tell them that I’d nicked it, though.

But when I
really
got into music – when the bug didn’t so much bite as take a huge fuck-off chunk out of my leg – was on holiday in Rhyl. This was just before I left the Town Hall for Butlin’s: 1973, it would have been. There was me, Deano, Stuart Houghton, Danny Lee and Greg Wood, I think, five of us in a four-berth caravan. Christ it was freezing, and there was no electricity – there were gas mantles for lights – but it was the first proper holiday I’d ever had, and we spent it roaming the streets of Rhyl and listening to Radio Luxembourg in the caravan. They kept playing a song called ‘Sebastian’ by Cockney Rebel. That was it for me. For the first time, I listened to a record and really thought,
Wow
. Why, I don’t know. Because it was different, I suppose; it seemed so different. It had a slow orchestral start and built to a climax – it was very long, too, which was something unheard of for a pop record back then. It just grabbed me – grabbed my attention and held it. Strange how we would emulate it with ‘Blue Monday’ years later.

When I got back off holiday I bought the single. It was nine minutes long and you had to turn the record over halfway through, which just sort of added to the experience: it was part of the ritual of playing it, gave the song a dramatic pause and made me like the record even more. After that I became a fan of Cockney Rebel and bought their first LP,
The Human Menagerie
– a great record. They became my gateway to music. Before this when I’d watched
Top of the Pops
I’d just goggled at it, but now it was like I was part of it; I understood it. Bowie, Roxy, Ian Dury – I started to get them now.

Years later I was at an awards ceremony with New Order getting an award for ‘Blue Monday’. I’d given up drinking by then, so I was straight as an arrow when Steve Harley strolled up to me, and I thought,
Oh, fuck, it’s Steve Harley out of Cockney Rebel.

He went, ‘Hello, Peter, how are you?’

And I thought,
Not only is it Steve Harley, but he knows who I am and he’s
dead
fucking nice
.

He went, ‘Oh, it’s so lovely to meet you. I believe that our first record was one of your inspirations?’

I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, it was,’ and ran away. Just couldn’t deal with it. Left him standing there looking around and no doubt thinking,
That was
fucking bizarre.
But it wasn’t as bizarre for him as it was for me. ‘Sebastian’ had got me into the whole thing. If it hadn’t been for Steve Harley I wouldn’t have been standing at that awards ceremony talking to Steve Harley. Very, very weird, that was.

After that – Rhyl, I mean, not the awards – I started reading
NME
and
Sounds
. Then we began going to gigs. Saw Led Zeppelin, Cockney Rebel, of course, and half of Deep Purple’s set before Barney made us leave because he had a toothache. It wasn’t just him who had to leave: it was all of us. He’s always got away with fucking murder, that one.

I first read about the Sex Pistols in April 1976, on another holiday. Me, Stuart Houghton, Danny Lee and Danny McQueeney decided to go to Torquay and Newquay in my new car, a Mark Ten Jag 420G, registration KFR 666F (funny how I can remember all the numbers) – the same model the Krays had – that I’d bought for £325. We weren’t staying anywhere, just sleeping in the car. Needless to say it was tough, but enjoyable; we got on well – it was one of those holidays I’ll never forget. The tyres were knackered and we couldn’t go more than fifty miles an hour – took us hours and hours to get there. But one thing I do remember was sitting in a car park in Newquay at about seven in the morning, still pissed from the night before, reading
Melody Maker
. It had the Sex Pistols in it, and there was a picture of them taken at their gig at the Nashville Rooms where a huge fight had broken out. Sitting there in the car park in Cornwall, with the sun coming up and all my mates snoring in the Jag, I had . . . Well, I suppose you could say I had another David Essex moment, an
epiphany
.

First off I was intrigued by the idea of a group who seemed, I don’t know,
human
compared to bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, who seemed, to a working-class tosser from Salford, so out of my league they might as well have lived on another planet. I mean, I’d never have looked at Led Zep and thought,
I’m going to be the next John Paul Jones.
He was like some kind of god up there. I loved the music. I loved watching it. But the idea of emulating them was ludicrous.

The Sex Pistols, though: they looked like working-class tossers
too
, which automatically made them completely different to anything I’d seen in music before. I was a great fan of James Dean; I’d seen
Giant
and
Rebel Without a Cause
. And now I felt a connection between him,
these
punks
and me. That real snotty, rebellious, arrogant-kid type of thing, only not in glossy-looking 1950s America but in grey old 1970s Britain. The Pistols were the link somehow. And the fact that they had a reputation for fighting at every gig and were part of this movement – this
punk
movement . . .

I was like,
I have
got
to see this lot.

31 May 1948

Martin Hannett born, Miles Platting, Manchester.

From an early age Hannett showed an aptitude for mathematics and science, interests he would carry through to his musical theory. Gaining a chemistry degree from Manchester’s UMIST, he played bass for Greasy Bear before forming the Invisible Girls, the backing band for John Cooper Clarke and, in later years, Pauline Murray and Nico. Together with Tosh Ryan he helped set up the musician’s collective
Music Force, then Rabid Records, the home of Slaughter & the Dogs. Styling himself Martin Zero, he went on to produce the Buzzcocks’
Spiral Scratch
EP, the first release on the independent New Hormones label run by the Buzzcocks’ manager Richard Boon. He produced Slaughter & the Dogs’ debut single, ‘Cranked Up Really High’, then worked with Chris Sievey (later known as Frank Sidebottom) and his band the Freshies, before scoring a Top Three hit producing Graham Fellows’ ‘Jilted John’ in July 1978. (Indeed, Hannett can be seen playing bass on a
Top of the Pops
performance of that song.) Shortly afterwards he produced Joy Division for the first time.

26 April (he asked me not to put the year in)

Alan Erasmus born, Didsbury.

Erasmus and Tony Wilson became friendly when they met at a Christmas party and bonded over a spliff. For a while Erasmus managed Fast Breeder but parted company with them and instead sought out Wilson, the two joining forces to put together a new band, the Durutti Column. The flat Erasmus shared with best friend Charles Sturridge (a Granada director who went on to make
Brideshead Revisited
) was at 86a Palatine Road, and doubled up as the Factory HQ.

20 February 1950

Tony Wilson born, Salford.

Wilson attended the De La Salle Grammar School in Salford, developing a love of drama and literature thanks to a performance of
Hamlet
at Stratford-upon-Avon. At seventeen he worked as an English and drama teacher at the Blue Coat School in Oldham; he then attended Cambridge, graduating with an English degree in 1971. After working for ITN as a trainee reporter he returned to Manchester in 1973, joining Granada and presenting
Granada Reports
as well as the music programme
So It Goes
. However, the end of
So It Goes
left Wilson pondering ways in which he could continue and extend his involvement in the music business . . .