It was hearing ‘Sebastian’ by Cockney Rebel on a holiday in Rhyl in North Wales in 1973 that truly ignited the young Peter Hook’s passion for music. He and schoolmate Bernard (Barney) Sumner were already attending gigs regularly when Hook read about the emerging Sex Pistols and immediately felt a connection with this bunch of ‘working-class tossers’. Sure enough, when the Pistols played Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall on 4 June 1976 (50p a ticket) Hook, Sumner and schoolfriend Terry Mason were among the audience and, like the majority of those who also attended (Mick Hucknall, Mark E. Smith and Morrissey among them), they decided to form a band. One visit to Manchester’s legendary Mazel’s music store later, and Sumner and Hook were the proud owners of lead and bass guitars respectively (Mason briefly the singer).
Quickly becoming familiar faces on Manchester’s growing punk scene, Hook and Sumner met Ian Curtis at the city’s Electric Circus venue. ‘He had “Hate” written on his jacket,’ remembers Hook. ‘I liked him immediately.’
A paragraph in Sounds on 18 December 1976 was the first press notice for the ‘Stiff Kittens’. A short time later, Curtis joined as lead singer, before the group abandoned the ‘Stiff Kittens’ name (‘too cartoon punk’) and became Warsaw. Drummer Steve Morris joined and played his first gig with the band at Eric’s, Liverpool, on 27 August 1977, completing the musical line-up, and by January 1978 the band had changed their name again, becoming Joy Division.
In May 1978 local DJ and promoter Rob Gretton joined as the group’s manager, and the following month Joy Division were featured on the compilation album Short Circuit – Live at the Electric Circus. In a relatively short space of time they had become one of the city’s leading post-punk bands. In short order came a landmark appearance on Granada Reports, where Tony Wilson introduced a performance of ‘Shadowplay’ and the world – or at least the north-west of England – was introduced to Curtis’s distinctive style of dancing.
More releases followed before, on 13 January 1979, Ian Curtis appeared on the cover of the NME. A few days later, however, the troubled singer was diagnosed with epilepsy. Things began to move fast. Recorded with mercurial producer Martin Hannett, debut album Unknown Pleasures was released to great acclaim in June. The band spent the rest of 1979 consolidating their success with gigs and TV appearances. It was an exhausting schedule that took its toll on Curtis, who by then was a new father, leading to several instances of on-stage fitting, as well as self-harming episodes.
In March 1980, the band convened to record their second album, Closer, with Hannett. However, the following month Ian, who had by then embarked on an intense love affair with Belgian journalist Annik Honoré, attempted suicide. A little later, Debbie Curtis, sick of her husband’s infidelity, announced her intention to begin divorce proceedings.
Then, on 18 May 1980, Joy Division ended. With a new album, Closer, and single, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, recorded and ready for release, singer Ian Curtis committed suicide days before the band were due to embark on a US tour. The three surviving members, bassist Peter Hook, drummer Stephen Morris and guitarist Bernard Sumner, reconvened and decided to carry on, starting with the two songs left by Ian and Joy Division – ‘Ceremony’ and ‘Little Boy’ (later to be renamed ‘In a Lonely Place’). In the meantime, plans were made for the trio to play live; and Ruth Polsky, the promoter of the aborted US Joy Division tour, booked a series of American dates.
Do we need to go into the circumstances of Ian’s death?
Not really; they are well documented and I’ve already done that in my Joy Division book and, anyway, all the books are about Ian’s death in a way. We were very young. I was just twenty-four and, looking back now, in my early sixties, shockingly young to have to deal with any of it. We were now very, very nervous. What would happen? Would we succeed in any way now Ian had gone? Were we good enough on our own . . . without him? We were scared. We never talked about it in depth. Never analysed any of it. We just scratched the surface with pithy comments. Getting strength from togetherness that ended up, in a true northern English fashion, with us taking the piss both out of Ian and each other. We never confronted the grief. No one around seemed to know what to do or say. Maybe it was just too shocking for everyone, so it was much easier for family and friends to ignore it and let us get on with it. I would say looking back I was very proud of all of our immediate circle: Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus of Factory, Rob and Pete Saville. None of them ever said it was over. The encouragement was always positive and about carrying on, as if this was just a hiccup on our upward trajectory. I thank them for that.
As a group we became very insular. I don’t remember any of our peers saying anything much to us. Maybe they did to Tony and Rob, Bono being the notable example, I suppose. We did receive a lot of letters from fans, expressing their shock and grief – some lovely and some even written in blood. At the time, I was so pleased to finally have a home phone of my own I even (stupidly or like a true punk) put my name in the phone directory and had some really weird stuttering phone calls that lasted for months. Finally I had to give in, change my number and go ex-directory.
Sadly this was also where my relationship with Debbie and her daughter Natalie and Ian’s parents finished too. I was embarrassed and ashamed, and I dealt with it by hiding away from them. Iris, my then-girlfriend, kept in touch but I suppose they had more in common. My relationship would only be rekindled years later when Debbie contacted me to help intervene in her business affairs with Rob. She was finding it very difficult dealing with him and I was delighted to help and since then we have had a good on-off relationship.
So this is, if you like, the story of a long and drawn-out grieving process that begins just a few days after his inquest when me, Barney and Steve, our manager Rob Gretton, and faithful helpers Terry Mason and Twinny, gathered at our rehearsal room next to Pinky’s Disco in Salford. And while them three sat around making tea and smoking dope and feeling sorry for themselves, us three did the only thing we could. We started playing, jamming, writing songs again.
Why not? After all, we were still professional musicians and had been for six months. And what professional musicians do when they’re not touring, making records or head-butting producers is hang around practice rooms waiting for inspiration to strike. So even though Pinky’s was a freezing cold pit with a dangerous hole in the floor, we took solace in it and our work. Besides, we had Tony Wilson and Rob on our backs. Rob in particular was like a lunatic, literally ordering us to play. It was like a mantra with him. ‘Write, come on, write. The best song you’re ever going to write is your next one, so come on. Chop chop.’
He was convinced that if he kept us behaving like musicians then, after a while, we’d return to being just that. In hindsight, of course, he was right and that did eventually happen, but at the time we were thinking, What are you going on about, mate? It’s fucked. It’s all over. Ian’s killed himself.
But if Rob told you to get your finger out and write, that’s what you did – or tried to do. We had ‘Ceremony’ and ‘Little Boy’ on tape already, and to work out the lyrics we had to listen to them over and over again, and hearing Ian’s voice like that it was almost like he was back with us in Pinky’s again. Weird.
And then it would hit you that he wasn’t.
The problem was that in Joy Division, he was our ears, he was the conductor, the lightning rod, and the majority of the songs happened through the process of him picking out the good bits as we played. Every now and then he’d stop us jamming and go, ‘That was a great bit. Play that again.’
Not any more. We were looking for him but he wasn’t there. Like twats we’d play for hours and nobody said a word. Not Rob, Terry or Twinny. Not me, Barney or Steve either. We’d lost him and we’d also lost our confidence.
We started recording the jams on our new four-track tape recorder so we could listen back and try to do what Ian had done. That worked, after a fashion. Trouble was, nobody wanted to do the vocals, so we ended up with loads of instrumental songs with titles like, ‘Idea No. 1’, ‘Idea No. 2’ and ‘Guitary one’, scrawled on the wall. But none of us could sing and play at the same time anyway, so we just played. Rob even had a go at some lyrics and titles, God bless him.
Meanwhile, the long-awaited ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ single came out, but we hardly noticed. I remember hearing it on the radio when I was driving to the post office. The DJ said it had come straight in at number 13 in the charts. I just turned it off and went in to tax my car. When Closer came out we didn’t promote it at all, didn’t even read the reviews. Why bother? It was over and done with. We were much too focused on trying to cope without him.
We discussed getting another singer. The three of us had played on a Kevin Hewick track called ‘Haystack’ for Factory Records, but talk of recruiting Kevin for vocals came to nothing.
It’s a myth that Bono approached Tony to offer his services. We wouldn’t have wanted him anyway, not because it was Bono or that we hated U2 (‘Them Irish twats,’ as Rob used to say), it was just that we didn’t want an established vocalist to come in and change how we worked. We wanted a singer; we didn’t want an Ian replacement. However, Tony did tell us later that Bono had come to his office in Granada, saying that Ian was the best of his generation and promising to carry on in his memory and achieve the success he felt Joy Division deserved. For Tony, U2 accomplished that at Live Aid, where he said Bono showed himself to be the only frontman with the charisma of Ian.
There was only one thing for it.
One of us lot would have to be the singer. To work it out, Rob thought it would be a good idea to put us in the studio with Martin Hannett, with Hannett in the Simon Cowell role and the three of us auditioning like a kind of post-punk X-Factor. It was a terrible idea, though. Martin had idolised Ian. Of everybody in the Factory family he was hit the hardest, and we entered the studio to find him medicating his depression in the usual way, with dope and coke. It didn’t exactly help matters that he’d always had a fairly low opinion of me, Steve and Barney anyway: ‘One genius and three Manchester United supporters’ was what he’d called Joy Division. Even though that’s not strictly speaking true, because Steve supported Macclesfield Town, but you knew what he meant. Being Martin Hannett, he wasn’t exactly backward when it came to telling us what a poor substitute we made for Ian’s genius.
‘Oh, you’re all shocking,’ he’d say, listening to the playback, head in hands. Fair enough, we were a bit shocking – I mean, none of us was under any illusions when it came to our singing – but we weren’t that bad. Pretty early on it became clear that Martin wasn’t bemoaning our presence so much as Ian’s absence.
Despite the fact that Steve, to say the least, wasn’t keen on singing, he still tried out, and so did me and Barney. I think secretly both of us fancied being frontman. But we were all shit according to Martin. At one point in Strawberry Studios we were recording ‘Ceremony’ and Martin had decided to use all our three vocals mixed together in the track at the same time. ‘The best of a bad bunch!’ he cried. Then he started cackling. But then Bernard insisted on having ‘just one more go’, and in doing so used up mine and Steve’s tracks, wiping them, so by the time Martin finally threw up his hands and told us to fuck off, Barney’s was the only vocal left on tape. Which is pretty much how he became our singer.
But even I have to admit it worked out well. Barney improved quickly and became a good vocalist. Also, the fact that he couldn’t sing and play at the same time helped us to develop a more unique sound, with the songs always picking up when he stopped singing and started hammering away at the guitar, as if he was taking out all of his vocal inadequacies, frustrations and grief on his poor old Gibson copy.
One gig is worth ten rehearsals. That’s what Rob used to say. He was desperate to get us gigging again, so when the Names, a band from Belgium, pulled out of a Factory Records night at the Beach Club in Manchester he decided we should do it as ‘The No Names’. He thought that was hilarious. Come the night and the audience didn’t know, the other bands didn’t know, the promoter didn’t know. Nobody knew it was the ex-Joy Division. The surprise on people’s faces as we set up and played was priceless, and A Certain Ratio were amazed. All I can remember of it was being terrified, setting up and playing, and me operating our trusty tape machine with all the keyboard parts on a backing track, and us doing a seven-song set where Steve sang three, and Bernard and I sang two each . . .
And not being bottled off. Now that was the most important thing. Not being bottled off.
So that was it. We’d popped our gig cherry as a trio. Rob decided we needed more and proposed getting in touch again with Ruth Polsky in America. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we promised her we were going to go as Joy Division. That twat killed himself. But we promised her we were going. So we’re fucking going.’
His idea was not to have the pressure of playing in Manchester, or anywhere in England come to that, so we’d be a bit more relaxed. His other idea involved the equipment. Rob reasoned that as we were already a bit on the shaky side, not having our own gear would only make us shakier, so he made the decision to fly it all over to America. To give us the comfort of what we knew best, to sound exactly how we wanted to sound: that was the plan. We’d lost our lead singer and our confidence, but at least we had great gear. So why not take it with us?
What could possibly go wrong?