‘This is New York’

There was this tiny, and I mean tiny, pub near our practice room at Pinky’s, called the Dover Castle. One dinnertime, Rob presented us with a load of ideas for band names that he’d got out of that week’s Sunday Times.

‘Let’s get it over with,’ he said.

Bearing in mind we were still in our early twenties and I was reading 2000AD and Sven Hassel books, him reading the Sunday Times seemed pretty radical. Very grown-up.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Khmer Rouge?’

No, too terrorist.

‘The Shining Path?’

That was too terrorist as well. Sounded like an LP title. Me and Barney hated that one.

‘Are they all terrorist names?’

‘No, don’t think so,’ said Rob, continuing. ‘Mau Mau, the Immortals, Fifth Column, Theatre of Cruelty, Year Zero, Arab Legion . . . oh, maybe they are?’

There were loads of them, all of which we hated.

‘You’ve got to fucking pick one,’ said Rob. ‘Now!’ As ever, he made it sound more like a threat than a request.

Rob and Steve decided on the Witch Doctors of Zimbabwe. Me and Bernard wanted New Order, which had begun life as ‘The New Order of Kampuchean Rebels’ (we gave the spare ‘The’ to Matt Johnson, and dumped the Kampuchean rebels). For a while there was a tense stand-off, with Rob and Steve saying New Order was a shit name and me and Barney threatening to leave the band if it was called the Witch Doctors of Zimbabwe.

We got our way. It was sorted and Rob sent the name off to Ruth. And I must say that never at any point did any of us consider a certain Mr Hitler and his bloody Mein Kampf, honest! Shows you how daft we were. We just thought it summed up our new start perfectly.

Then we went into Western Works, Cabaret Voltaire’s studios in Sheffield, and recorded and wrote a couple of tracks with them, one featuring Rob on vocals. We also played gigs in Liverpool and Blackpool, and carried on writing and rehearsing. By the time we left for New York, as well as ‘Ceremony’ and ‘In a Lonely Place’, we had ‘Dreams Never End’, ‘Procession’, ‘Mesh’ and ‘Homage’, plus the obligatory ‘new one’ (an instrumental in this case). Also a song called ‘Truth’ – our first to feature a drum machine, later a vital part of our arsenal.

Geek Alert

Dr. Rhythm DR-55

Released by Roland in 1980, the Doctor Rhythm offered three drum sounds, Kick, Snare and Hi-hat, as well as an Accent sound and a limited number of programmable patterns. Using active tone generation circuitry, its sounds were analogue, crisp and punchy; a balance knob altered the level of the Kick, Snare and Hi-hat while a separate Accent knob controlled the amount of emphasis to accented steps. It also featured a simple-step programmer with alternating button presses for notes and rests, and there was a ‘tap write’ programming mode, which lacked a metronome click for time-keeping. A volume control affected the overall level of both the main and headphone outputs, and the main output was mono. There was also a separate trigger facility, which emitted a pulse for every accented step in the pattern. The patterns were organised into banks, with A and B being programmable, and C and D presets. Each pattern could be switched between 12 or 16 steps, for 3/4 or 4/4 time signature, and two songs could be programmed, each containing a maximum of 128 bars.

The Boss Doctor Rhythm, bought and programmed by Steve, became a herald for a new age. Both he and Barney had flirted with electronica in Joy Division, Barney building from scratch a Transcendent 2000 synthesiser (given away in kit form with Electronics Today magazine), and Steve using a Synare I drum synthesiser. Their enthusiasm for all things electronic would grow and grow. The drum machine would also be used live as a backing track for the song ‘Procession’ so Steve could sing and play keyboards (obviously it was impossible for him to play the kit at the same time).

So, with our tried-and-trusted Velvet Underground ‘Sister Ray’ cover version, off we went.

Things started badly. We landed and British Airways had lost our cases. Fly the flag and lose your bag, eh? There were seven of us on the trip: me, Steve, Barney, Rob, Terry, Twinny and Dave Pils, and four of our cases went missing. Barney, who could fall into a vat of dog shit and still come up smelling of roses, was unaffected, and stood there, sympathetic as ever, saying, ‘Right, I’ve got my case, let’s get off then, shall we?’ smirking while those of us who’d lost them, including yours truly, had to hang around waiting for all the bloody forms to be filled in.

New York was wonderful, everything I’d hoped it would be. It was enjoying an Indian summer and it was as hot as hell, which wasn’t so bad if you had a change of clothes, but a disaster if you’d arrived from Manchester wearing jackboots, a thick coat and fucking British Airways had lost your bag.

It didn’t turn up for five days, that bag, and you don’t want to know how badly I stank by then.

But still. We were in New York. Finally we’d made it. And even though touring Manhattan felt sad because we’d catch sight of places Ian would have loved, like CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, it was still fantastic to be there, especially when we made it to our hotel and it turned out to be the infamous rock’n’roll joint the Iroquois on West 44th Street, second only to the Chelsea on West 23rd Street.

Why? It was even sleazier.

The Clash were staying there, too, and they were at their height, in between London Calling and Sandinista! But even though they were the Clash, and Paul Simonon was one of my bass heroes, there was an instant hatred between the two camps. Whether it was because they were Cockneys and we were Mancs, and they took themselves very seriously and we were shambolic, I don’t know, but there was an intense rivalry right from the word go. Every day at 5 p.m. the hotel offered free hors d’oeuvres (or as we used to call them, ‘horses’ doovres’) in the bar, and every day at 5 p.m. New Order and the Clash would be waiting for, then scrapping over them, grabbing the chicken wings and the loaded potato skins, both of which seemed exotic at the time, before the barman had even put them down, us going, ‘Fuck off, y’Cockney bastards,’ and them going, ‘Ah fack off, ya Manc twats.’ I knew that New Order were skint – we were on $3 a day ‘per day’ money – but I was surprised that the Clash were as hungry as we were.

(Incidentally, Rob’s book claims he allowed $700 per day money for the trip but I can guarantee we never saw that much.)

‘Per day’ or ‘per diem’ money is a charming old rock’n’roll custom where the band or crew member is given cash for everyday expenses on top of their wages. Essentially a bonus, the money is usually spent on drugs and goes undeclared either to the wife or taxman. It was supposed to be receipted-for in records but when New Order were investigated by HMRC in 1985 and Rob referred to the receipts, most were signed M. Mouse or W. Churchill etc., and so the band were fined for poor accounting practice (though the crew got away scot free). These days the practice must be included as a personal gain on a P1 1D personal tax declaration form.

One time, me and Barney shared the hotel lift with Joe Strummer, who got in with piles of dandruff all over the shoulders of his black coat, holding on tightly to some American girl.

As we alighted at our floor Barney turned round, smiled and said to him, ‘Is it snowing outside?’

‘Fack off!’ he snarled, as the doors shut.

Meanwhile, every time Rob saw Bernie Rhodes, their manager, he’d call him a cockney bastard, shouting it straight across the bar.

You could understand the friction. We weren’t exactly at our most endearing.

So anyway, having made enemies of the Clash it was decided to hire a couple of vehicles: the U-Haul van for all the gear and what’s called a shooting brake for us, the musicians, to travel in. It was a light-blue Buick eight-seater with rear-gunner-style seats in the back. If you’ve read the Joy Division book you’ll know how bad Steve was at driving, and Barney had only passed his test the week before, so had no confidence at all, so it fell to me to drive. Trouble was, I’d forgotten my licence, so we cooked up a plan where Barney was going to hire the car, and then as soon as we were out of the hire place, we’d swap seats and I’d drive for the rest of the trip.

All Barney had to do was drive out of the hire place. That was all, a thirty-foot drive.

Fuck me, it was hair-raising. It was an automatic, which he’d never driven, so I sat beside him going, ‘Just relax, be calm. I’ll take over as soon as we’re out on the street. Now take your foot off the brake and gently press the accelerator . . .’

‘Aaaaarrgggh!’ six Mancs screamed in terror, as the car began to violently kangaroo towards the busy street, Barney alternating his foot from brake to gas. He was gripping the wheel, face and knuckles white with fear as we headed to the exit.

‘Bernard, brake,’ I said. ‘Brake, mate. Brake, for fuck’s sake!’

And he did, just in time, and six Mancs sighed with relief as Bernard came to a screeching halt and just avoided hitting a car, the car in question being a hearse, complete with coffin. You should have seen their faces in the hire office. We then started to have some fun driving round Manhattan in the shooting brake shouting things like, ‘Hello girls, we’re in a band!’ when Barney spotted a pair of skis in a dustbin and made us stop so he could grab them.

‘These are great!’ he said, except they weren’t really. They were horrible old plywood things, black with paint peeling off.

Later we pulled up at some lights and Twinny jumped out of the car. We were like, ‘Hey, what’s going on now?’

We looked over to see him taking a pair of shoes off a tramp who was passed out on the street. He left his own shoes with the guy and got back in the car, we were all, ‘What the fuck?’

‘Fuck off!’ he says, ‘they’re Kickers. These are brand new and mine have got holes in!’ You can take the boy out of Salford, eh?

Meanwhile, vehicle number two was the U-Haul van. Driving that was Terry, who was a good driver but nervous, and became even more so in the very busy New York traffic. For our first gig at Maxwell’s, New Jersey, him, Twinny and Dave Pils had to pick up the gear from the airport, bring it back to the hotel and then take it to the gig the next day.

Now, when it came to the van, we had our gear insured with the Co-operative Insurance Services in Manchester. Rob in particular was very diligent about things like insurance: ‘I worked for Eagle Star for two weeks in the 1970s!’ Anyway, the policy stated that the van had to be alarmed or the gear wasn’t insured. The one we’d hired wasn’t alarmed, so for security, I told Terry to remove the high-tension lead (ask your dad) and bring it into the hotel. First night we were there I’d said to Rob, ‘I bet you that fucker hasn’t taken off the H-T lead,’ went out, popped the hood, checked, and sure enough the dozy twat had left it on, so I took the lead off, all covered in oil and grime, found Terry sound asleep in his room and draped the cable across his face, giving him a lovely Mexican Zapata oil-moustache in the process. Thinking that would teach him, I left it at that.

The next day we were all very excited and the boys set off for the gig with us following a few hours later. However, when we arrived at Maxwell’s there was no sign of the van or Terry, Twinny and Dave. After a while they drove up, all as white as sheets and screaming blue murder Terry had managed to crash the van twice on the way. He’d hit a bus and the side of the Jersey tunnel. Plus they’d had a puncture.

Still, nobody had died, and we started unloading the gear, including a transformer – a bit of kit we needed to cope with the voltage difference between our English gear and the output in the US.

Only, Terry had hired this particular bit of kit on Rob’s orders, and neither of them knew the first thing about stepping up voltage. So on the basis that if you had a big transformer you couldn’t go wrong, Rob had told Terry to hire the biggest he could find (this would become a habit of Rob’s).

He had, and it was huge. Terry had actually hired Pink Floyd’s transformer and they were playing stadiums at the time. It weighed a ton – two tons in fact. A 250-kilowatt transformer. God knows how they got it in the van. It took six of us to lift it out. We plugged it in at Maxwell’s and I swear the lights dimmed in Manhattan as it powered up.

Turned out to be a great gig. I mean, it was only our fourth as a three-piece but it felt like we’d got some of our mojo back, and with all three of us sharing vocals we began to think we might be able to pull this off. Maybe there really was life after Joy Division.

Back at the hotel all of the band were on a high, but Terry, Twinny and Dave Pils had topped their nightmare journey to the venue with a just-as-white-knuckle drive back. Finally arriving at the hotel hours after us, then parking right outside on 44th Street, they were way too frazzled to do anything but crawl to bed.

The next morning I was on Terry’s back about moving the van so we wouldn’t get a parking ticket. Off he trudged to do the deed – only to return a few minutes later, looking very sheepish.

‘Umh,’ he said, pulling on the wattle. ‘Van’s gone.’

‘You what?’

‘Van’s gone.’

‘Van’s gone?’ I said. ‘How the hell has the van gone? Don’t tell me you forgot to take off the . . .’

Great.

Even so, we came to the conclusion that the van had been towed away for a traffic violation and spent the rest of the day scouring Manhattan for it. After the umpteenth pound had told us that, no, they hadn’t seen a van full of musical gear, a very heavy transformer and a pair of old wooden skis, we finally faced up to the fact that our van and all our equipment had been stolen.

Shit!

So, me and Rob hotfooted it to the local police station. I marched straight up to the desk sergeant and, adopting my best Hugh Grant voice, said something along the lines of, ‘Excuse me, my dear fellow, we seem to have had some of our property stolen, old boy.’

But instead of despatching Kojak and issuing APBs, he said in a very broad New Yawk accent, ‘Sit down oveh dere!’ and pointed at a bench.

I was aghast. ‘My dear fellow, you don’t seem to understand. I am English and I will call the British Embassy if . . .’

Before I could finish he repeated himself, much louder this time, giving me a proper Alex Ferguson hairdryer, with his hand on his gun for good measure. ‘Sit down oveh fuckin’ dere!’

Me and Rob did as we were told, trembling like two naughty schoolboys.

Later, what seemed like much later, he gave us a piece of paper, and told us to fill it in. It was awful. If we were scared before we were terrified now. The gear was gone and it seemed like no one, not even the police, was going to help.

We filled in the form as best we could and returned it to the cop, who didn’t even look up. Then, as we went to leave, he said, ‘Hey!’ We turned back, smiling, full of hope that he was going to help after all. Hooray! Rob and I beamed at each other, then at him. ‘Welcome to New Yawk!’ he grinned, then looked down again.

Outside, full of righteous indignation, we phoned the embassy and asked to speak to the ambassador. He would help, surely? We were taxpayers after all. When we explained to the receptionist what had happened she just told us to go to the cops. Then hung up.

Double shit!

We hit on the idea of phoning the insurance company, so Rob got on the blower at the hotel and, I kid you not, this is how it went.

‘Hello, yeah, Rob Gretton here. We’re New Order; we’ve got an insurance policy with you. Number so and so. Right, that’s right . . .’

We were all looking at each other. The guy must have gone off to find the details. Rob gave us the thumbs up. Don’t worry, lads, it’s all being sorted. Guy comes back to the phone.

‘Right,’ said Rob, ‘you’ve got the policy. Great. We’ve had all the gear stolen. Well, it’s covered isn’t it?’ Pause. ‘Yeah, great,’ another thumbs up, pause. ‘Was the van alarmed? No it wasn’t. Hello . . . Hello? He’s hung up.’

Our mouths dropped open in disbelief and as Rob, with a ‘that’s torn it’ expression, realised what he’d done, we all exploded into a big shouty mess, our anger directed at our stupid manager: ten thousand pounds’ worth of gear gone, never to be replaced. There might not be any point in crying over spilt milk, but we did it anyway. Tony Wilson, who was in New York at the same time recording A Certain Ratio’s second album, said, ‘It’s so poetic, darling. It’s the perfect ending!’

We seethed silently.

Next step, tell Ruth, who had kittens but begged us to carry on. We decamped to her office in Danceteria and hit the phones to hire gear, while Rob made amends by making me and Barney use our credit cards to pay for new equipment. A trip to Manny’s, a huge Aladdin’s Cave of a music shop on 48th Street yielded, for Barney, a nice Yamaha guitar combo and a Gibson 335 with ‘second’ stamped on the back of the headstock (although none of us could see why, but it was cheap at $550 so we kept schtum). I got a Yamaha BB800 for $431 but had a problem replacing my Shergold six-string bass. There was no equivalent in America. And no matter how much I tried, the only one I could find to hire was a Fender version, which I had to go and pick up from downtown Manhattan. There, I literally bumped into Liza Minnelli coming out of her room. ‘Liza! With a Zee!’ I blurted, without really thinking about it.

‘Fuck off,’ she drawled in return.

Charming!

So nothing was getting any better. We’d lost our gear and I’d been told to fuck off by Liza Minnelli with a Zee, and the only real respite from the misery was when Rob and I were in Times Square and came across a stall where you could print up your own New York Times front cover. I mocked one up that said, ‘TERRY & TWIN IN $40,000 ROAD CREW FOUL-UP – ROB AMAZED’, took it back and showed it to the high-tension-lead twins, who freaked, thinking they’d made the daily papers.

Apart from that, it was blood, sweat and tears: me, Barney and Steve sitting in a room at the Iroquois having to relearn and rewrite all the songs.

Geek Alert

Fender Baritone Bass Guitar

The Fender Baritone Bass Guitar is a six-string electric bass guitar made by Fender. It debuted in 1961 and differed from the previous Fender Precision Bass by having six strings with lighter gauges, a shorter scale and a mechanical vibrato arm. As with most Fenders then, it had a 7¼-inch fingerboard radius. The original Bass VI had three Stratocaster single-style coil pickups, controlled by a panel of three on/off slider switches instead of the more common three-position switch. The Fender Baritone bass guitar is tuned a fourth lower than a normal guitar to BEADFB, whereas the Shergold six-string bass guitar is tuned to concert pitch at EADGBE.

The hire guy had warned me. ‘This is a baritone,’ he kept saying.

‘I don’t care. It’s not singing, mate, it’s just playing!’

Back at the hotel I tuned it up to EADGBE, overtightening the strings, and breaking them one by one, bending the neck like a banana. I was lucky I didn’t lose an eye. It was useless. This led to me having to relearn all the six-string songs on the four-string in a blind panic, with Steve banging along on phone books beside me. There is definitely a special kind of camaraderie that comes from being thrown against the ropes, and we all pulled together, and even forgave Terry and co.

So anyway, we managed to do the rest of the gigs. And I suppose if there’s one thing to be said for having most of your gear nicked it’s that it liberated us from the responsibility of looking after it, and we ended up partying harder than we would have done otherwise. Every cloud, and all that.

Then, on returning to New York, there was a message for us – the cops had found the van.

‘It was in the middle of the Brooklyn Expressway,’ we were told. The crooks had dumped it on the central reservation with the doors open and the engine still running.

We hardly dared ask. ‘Is there anything still in it?’

The cop nodded confidently. ‘Yeah, man, there was stuff in it. If you go to the pound you can get it back.’

We were literally dancing in the police station, over-fucking-joyed, singing, ‘The stuff’s in the back, the stuff’s in the back,’ and all but floated on a cloud of optimism to the pound, where a city employee led us to our long-lost van, removed the new padlock and opened the rear doors with a flourish.

‘There you go,’ he said, ‘there’s your stuff.’

In the back was the transformer. And the fucking skis.

‘Brilliant!’ said Barney. He clambered into the van and retrieved the skis, happy as Larry. The rest of us looked at each other, mouths open in disbelief.

The transformer would have been worth a fortune if they’d sold it for scrap because there was so much copper in it, but they couldn’t lift it out of the van. Thank God for small mercies, at least we didn’t lose our deposit on it. Otherwise, it was all gone. We’d lost our singer, lost our gear, our insurance cover and, thanks to Rob choosing the ‘Something to Declare’ route at the airport on the way back, ended up spending six hours and getting stung for a load of import tax on the gear we’d bought in New York.

And yet it hadn’t been a disaster. In fact, it had been a hell of a first tour. I mean, what an adventure. Did I mention us touring all the great clubs in Manhattan, with Rob going, ‘Look how simple this place is. It’s just painted black with a PA in one corner. Brilliant!’ (and the idea for the Haçienda was born).

There were some great adventures. One night a member of our entourage shagged Ruth. Talk about every dog having his day. Delta 5, a group from Leeds, were playing in New York at the same time and one of them nearly had a fight with Ruth over who was going to sleep with him. Ruth won but said to her the next day, ‘You can have him. He kept his Y-fronts on the whole time!’ Another member of our entourage – the jammy bastard – became very friendly with Beth, the gorgeous singer.

On the last night a member of our entourage was desperate to get a blow job off a hooker and went out, doing the dirty deed in an alley near the hotel at a cost of $15, a bargain! Rob was so excited by this that he persuaded the guy to go out and sneak the hooker back in so she could give us all a blow job. ‘I’ll pay for everyone!’

So our guy went back out, but got caught bringing her in by the night watchman. He panicked and handed the guy a $20 bribe.

‘You limeys are amazing!’ he laughed. ‘I normally get paid to throw them out!’

I went first, and then we sniggered uncontrollably as we peeped round the corner to watch Rob, fascinated by his toes, which were doing the weirdest things, clawing and curling up like you wouldn’t believe. Lucky for him we didn’t have camera-phones in those days.

It was a wild, eye-opening time and I loved every second of it. I remember being in the taxi on the way to the airport at the end, as we drove over the 41st Street bridge, looking over my shoulder and seeing the whole of Manhattan lit up so beautifully, like a huge Christmas tree, and being so dog-tired that I could hardly keep my eyes open. It seemed like an amazing hallucination. I tried to rouse the others, but none of them would, or could, wake up. Then I fell asleep myself, and was shaken awake by the cab driver when we arrived, stumbling through the airport onto the plane and falling asleep again straight away.

Everybody slept the whole flight back, only waking when it touched down in Manchester. We were that exhausted. I remember getting home and Iris saying, ‘Well, what was it like then?’ and me going, ‘Quiet. You know . . .’ and sloping off to bed to recover.

That tour, so full of ups and downs, did a lot to dispel the unhappiness around Ian dying. It was the first time – and now, in retrospect, one of the only times – we’d been a real band in the true sense of the word. There were no diva tantrums and, because we were sharing singing duties, there was no ‘pecking order’ bullshit either. The ups and downs of the tour brought us together. They made us tighter. I’m not sure we would have continued but for that tour.

And those skis, by the way, never did make it back. Me and Twinny chucked them in the bin, and Barney’s never forgiven us. Never stopped going on about them.