During the first leg of the tour we toured with the Throwing Muses. Then halfway through they left and the Sugarcubes and Public Image Ltd came on board for a longer second leg, playing to even bigger out-of-town stadiums and arenas.
I’d been really looking forward to meeting Public Image Ltd. This was around the time of their album 9, and although it wasn’t exactly what you’d call vintage (probably because it was produced by Stephen Hague, ha-ha, only joking), it was still Public Image Ltd. It came with the two Johns, John Lydon – one of my all-time heroes – and John McGeoch, who had played guitar with Magazine and Siouxsie and the Banshees, to name but two.
But they turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. They were wearing hideous, multicoloured costumes, and they had this whole ‘band’ thing going on, with Johnny Rotten out front and the rest of the band stood behind him like dressed-up turkeys. It was about the most anti-punk thing I could imagine. Plus they were really boring and professional, and they just didn’t get us at all. John Lydon in particular was completely perplexed by us. He didn’t get the anti-frontman frontman; he didn’t get the upstaging bass player; he didn’t get the woman that never moved and looked like she was sucking a lemon, and he certainly didn’t get the music. It used to drive him mad that we were so anonymous, like I could walk out into the auditorium before a 25,000-capacity gig and not be recognised. John couldn’t understand how we not only revelled in that anonymity, but actively encouraged it.
In short, he pretty much hated us on every level possible. We did become friends with the band and crew in particular; PIL’s crew still consisted of many of the cockneys from the old days of the Banshees and Killing Joke, people like Stretch, Trigger and Kev the Hammer (who’s not so-called because he supports West Ham).
We did get the wrong end of the stick and one night decided to jape them. Me, Ozzy and Jacko, one of the roadies, got a load of banana skins and put them all over the stage while they were playing, carefully placing one on each of John McGeoch’s pedals. They did not take it well and got really upset. We had certainly read this lot wrong. From then on Johnny L. would be forever getting up while we were on stage to try and upstage us, appearing in the wings like a pantomime dame shouting, ‘They are shit!’ to the audience, berating them for enjoying themselves.
In private he’d say to me, ‘That fucking lead singer of yours, he’s fucking shit, he’s got no fucking personality, he’s a twat, he can’t fucking sing, can’t fucking play guitar. And that woman, she’s fucking useless.’
I’d go, ‘Yeah, but they’re mine, and we’re still ten times bigger than you.’ The legend goes that they had to tell Johnny he was actually headlining but going on before New Order to get him to do the tour. Doesn’t sound right to me. John was too savvy, a very bright man. He’d learned the hard way, just like us, and it was certainly not lost on me that my inspiration was now less well known than us, his students.
Which was true. We had Substance, which had gone platinum in America, sold three million albums. We were on the crest of a wave and Public Image Ltd were getting further and further away from their major commercial success, which was Album. Our bands were going in completely different directions.
Overall, he was bit of a nightmare. Another one to make Barney look like a princess by comparison, even Ian McCulloch was put in the shade by John Lydon. He used to arrive at soundcheck and sit with me, spitting, going fuck this, fuck that, fucking cunts this, fucking cunts that, and I’d go, ‘John, there’s only me and you here, why can’t you just talk normally?’
‘Fuck off,’ he’d drawl.
It was as though he didn’t know any other way. He was just ‘Johnny Rotten’ all the time, and the thing is that while it’s the kind of persona that’s obviously very entertaining and colourful, I can tell you from experience that it gets pretty wearing when he keeps it up twenty-four hours a day. One of his idiosyncrasies was that he had to have a particular size of Evian bottle in his dressing room. He had this idea that the big bottles of Evian tasted inferior to the small bottles, so if they only had the big ones backstage he’d refuse to go on.
‘You fucking bunch of twats, I’m not going on until you get me the small bottles of Evian,’ he’d snarl, leading to a mass panic as various lackeys scrambled to find the right size for him. Don’t forget, these gigs were in the middle of nowhere. Trying to find small bottles of Evian for Johnny Rotten wasn’t as easy as it sounds, sometimes they’d have to drive for miles.
Still, personally speaking, I got on with him really well, which is why he ended up asking me to play bass on his next album, something I couldn’t do. Shame.
So anyway, back to Detroit. The night before the gig at Detroit our mate Lippy decided we should all go to Chicago for a night out, and hired a limo. Unfortunately, when we got there everything was shut so we drove back, getting completely wasted on the drive and again when we arrived at wherever we were staying, and then in the morning we got on the plane to get to the next gig, which was Detroit – a huge, out-of-town venue.
I was nocturnal by this point, staying up all night then getting the flight the next morning, then sleeping and getting up for the soundcheck, doing the gig and spending the rest of the night off my face – every day – repeat till fade.
In Detroit, we were having a grand old time, getting ready for another riotous evening, when a girl came in and said to me, ‘There’s a phone call for you.’
I followed her to the office.
‘Hi, Hooky, it’s Tom, I’m at the hospital with Bernard.’
This was the first I’d heard of it. ‘You what?’
‘Yes, I’m here in the room with him now, and he’s really not well. We’re going to have to cancel the gig.’
I went, ‘You fucking what? You tell that twat to stop fucking around and get his arse back here now.’
‘Yes, Hooky, I’ll give him your best regards.’
‘No, don’t give him my best regards, tell him I’m going to fucking batter him, the twat. Tell him I’m going to fucking batter his fucking brains out when I see him. Because I am sick of his “woe is me, please pity me” fucking act.’
‘The doctors say Bernard might have an ulcer.’
‘Well, tell them they can keep the Bernard and send us the ulcer.’
‘Oh, that’s very kind of you to be so concerned, Hooky, I’m sure Bernard will be touched.’ And he hung up.
I wasn’t surprised he might have an ulcer. We’d all been hammering it. Upshot was, we had to cancel the gig, the first time we’d ever done it as New Order.
By the time I got to the dressing room an army of people had arrived and were grabbing everything in sight. The panicking promoter was trying to cash in the rider so his people were stripping out the dressing room while we were still there. Moments before it had been laid out like a maharajah’s palace – a haven of delights to come – suddenly it was bare.
Barney turned up the next day feeling better, and of course the tour went ahead, but if you ask me that was a revelatory moment for him. He must have thought, They need me. They can’t do it without me.
The next gig was Pittsburgh, and for some reason he spent most of it sitting on the drum riser, sighing between delivering the lines of ‘Blue Monday’. I spent half the gig watching him thinking, God, what a twat you are . . .
But then I had a change of heart and I thought, You know what? It really does take guts to do that. I admire that.
In a way that was the difference between us and Public Image Ltd. If we were pissed off, we showed it to the audience, but if Public Image Ltd were pissed off they hid it. It was like a pantomime with them now, all gloss and surface. But then they walked off and, like every other band, they couldn’t stick each other. It’s all a big daft act.
So even though Barney was by any normal standards behaving appallingly, sticking two fingers up to the 23,000 people who had paid to see us, I had to admire him for not buying into that whole play-acting thing.
Not that my admiration had any effect on our relationship. By the end of the tour the three component parts of New Order couldn’t stand to be in a room with one another. At our end-of-tour party in New Jersey there were three rooms: mine, Bernard’s and Gillian and Steve’s. Members of the crew moved between them, valiantly trying and failing to bring us together, but it wasn’t happening. We had one more date to do. Headline slot at that year’s Reading Festival. After that? Nothing.
As far as we all were concerned, New Order was grinding to a halt, it was over, and the sooner the better for all of us, except poor old Rob. He was heartbroken.
Meanwhile, Jane had called my bluff and decided to stay in America. She wouldn’t wait for me any more. I returned home and did two things: one, I went cold turkey (well, ‘room temperature turkey’ – I reverted to nights out and special occasions rather than the tour diet of ‘all day, every day’), and two, I came clean about Jane with Iris, who was then seven months’ pregnant. She went berserk and kicked me in the bollocks, and we split up. It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. But it was either that or suicide, and I even contemplated that (‘keep passing the open windows’ – thanks to John Irving for that one).
Jane remained in the States while I moved into her flat in a place called Rusholme Gardens, in Rusholme, sharing with her flatmate, a lovely girl called Bernie. The place was really cool and populated mainly by people who worked at the Haçienda. I was in good company. I’d lie in Jane’s bed curled in a foetal position for hours, listening to the guy upstairs practise classical piano, all twisted up with cold turkey and the grief of losing Heather, not to mention my unborn child. I thought the pain would kill me. I lived on a diet of Budweiser and Bombay mix for two months. I lost three stone, a proper divorce diet. Bowser, another roadie, took to calling me ‘Hooky no arse’.
I remember talking to Barney in the cocktail bar of the Haçienda one night, which in itself was weird because that was something we never did on tour, unless he was off it and apologising. I suppose we must have been off our heads.
He said to me, ‘How’s it going, now you’re back?’ and I told him about my shambles of a love life, and he told me, ‘Sometimes in life, you have to do something for yourself. Whether you like it or not, Hooky, everything radiates from you, and if you’re unhappy then they’re going to be unhappy.’
I thought to myself, Fuck me, he’s absolutely right.
What I had to do for myself, of course, was be with the love of my life – who at that time was Jane.
I pulled myself together. I bought a ticket to America, went and found her and told her it was all over between me and Iris and asked her to return with me. She did, and we ended up setting up house on Circular Road in Withington, a house of six flats I bought for £76,500 and would eventually turn into a home for me, Jane and the kids. I was entering another phase of my life.
When my son Jack was born that September the guilt I felt at leaving my kids was brought home to me. I felt a failure as a man and a father. I didn’t get to see him for a while after he was born, and it was a very difficult time for me, Iris, and Jane too. For the American tour I was paid £175,000 and that I gave straight to Iris. Guilt is a useless emotion.
New Order’s preparations to play Reading were just as depressing as you’d expect given the circumstances. The circumstances being that there were no New Order plans afterwards, no gigs booked, no studio time pending, nothing. I’d seen Barney’s notes for Electronic, remember – how he planned to promote the hell out of it, go dead poppy, the complete antithesis of what he was about in New Order. It was weird but not entirely unsurprising. After all, I had similar plans for Revenge. After ten years of being in a band together we were sick and tired of each other, couldn’t wait to get away.
For some reason at Reading, possibly because I was using a radio microphone on my guitar for the first time, I was able to wander around. Listening to the others’ sound on stage – the foldback – I became aware that none of them were hearing the whole band. I was the only one who listened to each component part through my foldback. Gillian had Gillian. Barney had Barney. Steve had Steve. They were all just listening to themselves.
That said it all. At the end of the gig Barney smashed his guitar. It was a proper damp squib. It was one of the most miserable gigs I had ever done. We had everything, headlining in front of 100,000 people, but it felt like I had nothing, knowing it was to be the end.
I had watched Jimi Hendrix Live in Monterey a few nights before and loved it, especially when he set his guitar alight. That’s it! I thought, I’ll do that. It will symbolise a new start for Revenge, a phoenix rising from the ashes of New Order.
Brilliant idea. I bought some lighter fluid and some matches and had it all planned for after ‘Fine Time’. At the end I threw the six-string down, sprayed the fluid on it and . . . it wouldn’t light. I tried for ages but just couldn’t get it to catch, and everyone was laughing at me. Turns out it’s the vapour from the fluid that burns. Jimi had obviously benefited from the still Monterey desert evenings. Damn you, Hendrix. In the end I threw down the guitar and stalked off.
In typical fashion, my mates were all there and by the time I came off were all twatted, completely off it, and everything pharmaceutical had gone. I stomped to my room with six warm cans of lager, the only thing I could get my hands on.
The aftershow party was nuts, I heard. I didn’t even go; I was in a hotel room opposite and could see it all unfolding from my window, the strangest feeling.
What a life.
International rock star = bollocks.
A few days after Reading, I let myself into the practice rooms in Cheetham Hill intending to get my bass gear and take some keyboards and sequencers back to Suite 16, in order to resume work on Revenge. I got there to find that the others had arrived before me and virtually stripped it bare. Not only had Barney been, but Steve and Gillian had made separate trips. I should have gone mad at them. But let’s face it, if I’d got there first, I’d have done exactly the same. I said to Terry, ‘I’m slipping.’ The only thing left in the whole place apart from my bass rig was Barney’s smashed guitars off tour. Jonny Hugo had put all the bits in a big plastic bag and stuck it in a bin in the loading bay. I put them back together and made three Frankenstein guitars.
In the end I retreated to Suite 16 to lick my wounds, and though the next few years with Revenge would be a time of great confusion and not exactly what you’d call a great artistic success – on top of which I had to deal with my split from Iris, then subsequently a painful split from Jane, as well as an increasing consumption of drugs and drink – there was at least one silver lining.
I didn’t have to put up with Barney any more.
I remember going to see Echo and the Bunnymen after Mac had left. I got backstage and the atmosphere among the band had palpably changed. Without Mac they were getting on famously, having a laugh, and they were the first to admit, ‘Hooky, we know the edge is missing, but it’s so much better without him for us.’ Talk about suffering for your art.
It was like that with me and him. Even though it was a relief not to have to put up with him, there was no doubt that the edge was missing. It wasn’t quite the same without him. The fucker.
In typical fashion, straight after we split we ended up getting back together again, two ideas being mooted. Project number one was very interesting creatively: a long-talked-about collaboration with the famous film director Michael Powell, of The Red Shoes. Michael Shamberg had been pushing this one for a while and it looked as if finally it had come to fruition. We went to meet Michael Powell, then in his mid-eighties, in his offices in London. He was lovely and very enthusiastic about our music. I think the others saw this as an opportunity to feature a new synthesiser dancey track but Michael said, ‘No.’ He had already chosen the track ‘Age of Consent’. I was delighted. His idea was to film a piece based on a poem called ‘The Sands of Dee’ actually on the sands of the River Dee, which winds its way through Chester and out into the Irish Sea. ‘Rugged and wild, much like the song,’ he said. I couldn’t have been happier when he said that. Stick that in your dancey pipe and smoke it, you cunts. The dramatisation was to star Tilda Swinton.
Project number two couldn’t have been more different: a collaboration with the England football squad for the 1990 World Cup. This was purely commercial and could not be turned down. We all wrinkled our noses but had no doubt that for New Order and hence for our solo projects this was indeed great news.
Tony had been at a function and met the man in charge of PR for the Football Association. He was bemoaning the fact that the pop groups who did the World Cup songs were awful and why couldn’t a ‘good’ group do it the way New Order had with ‘Best and Marsh’.
Tony simply said, ‘Well, why don’t you ask them?’
He did: the rest, as they say, is history.