“Fuck, Martin’s got a boot full of stolen car radios”
We were still at TJ Davidson’s, where we were being very productive. From two rehearsals—one on a weeknight, for an hour or an hour and a half, which cost us £1.50, then three hours on Sundays, which was £3—we’d get an idea a week and write two to three songs a month; and I’d say that from the time we wrote “Transmission” onward they just flowed like rain. I mean, writing songs is easy when you’re just starting out. It gets a lot harder and takes longer when you’ve written two or three hundred. You get overdrawn at the riff bank. But back then we couldn’t stop writing them.
All four of us had ideas. One of us would have been listening to Kraftwerk and suggest using that sound as the basis for a song. We’d all chip in and by the time the song was finished, even though the seed of the song had been Kraftwerk, it wouldn’t sound like Kraftwerk at all. That was the art. It sounded like Joy Division. In this particular case it sounded like “Digital,” in fact.
“Shadowplay” happened in a similar way: Bernard had been listening to “Ocean” by Velvet Underground and wanted to write a track like that, with the surf sound, a rolling feeling in it. So we started jamming and that’s how we came up with “Shadowplay.” You wouldn’t say it sounded anything like Velvet Underground, but once you know you can hear the root.
That was the thing about Joy Division: writing the songs was dead easy because the group was really balanced; we had a great guitarist, a great drummer, a great bass player, a great singer. As soon as Ian died it became difficult. He had an ear for us, a great ear, and all bands need one of those. You could tell he would have been a great guitar player too. His guitars of choice were the Vox Peardrop and the Vox Teardrop, very idiosyncratic; the Teardrop had some wild built-in effects that he loved. He’d picked the guitar up late, starting around the time we were writing the songs that would become Closer. Maybe Barney’s playing was still bugging him, but a more likely explanation was that we were featuring more keyboards and Barney was switching between the two. Maybe Ian thought he’d fill in. He played on the video for “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and was obviously quite a rudimentary player, but you could tell he would have gotten so much better because he had that ear—he thought like a musician. The way it worked was that he’d listen to us jamming, and then direct the song until it was . . . a song. He stood there like a conductor and picked out the best bits.
Which was why, when we lost him, it made everything so difficult. It was like driving a great car that had only three wheels. The loss of Ian had opened up a hole in us and we had to learn to write in a different way. It was hard, that period, just starting New Order, and we suddenly found it very difficult to adjust. We felt like we’d been cheated. It had been so easy, so good when it was the four of us. We were so tight, as a group, we didn’t even use a tape recorder half the time. Didn’t need one. We had the odd one, of course, but they never lasted or the quality was so poor as to make them virtually useless. But it didn’t matter because we could do most things from memory. Everything up to and including Unknown Pleasures really existed only when the four of us were in a room together playing it. Not written down, not recorded, just from memory.
Peter Saville has a wonderful theory that musicians stop writing great music when they learn about the formal process of making music. Why? Because then they won’t take any chances. When you’re young, you go, “G, B. Oh yeah, man, that fucking takes your head off, that! Weird but sounds great!”
Then, when you get older and you know a lot more about how music is supposed to sound, you go, “Oh, that G, B, that jars a little doesn’t it? Oh no, try E flat. That’s better,” and the edge is gone. I agree with him. The more proficient you become at writing music the fewer chances you take because you become aware of all the rules and theories that may well be the proper way to do things but end up constricting you, throttling all the creativity out of what you’ve got. No more risk-taking. Back then we didn’t know rules or theory. We had our ear, Ian, who listened and picked out the melodies. Then at some point his lyrics would appear. He always had his scraps of paper that he’d written things down on and he’d go through his plastic bag. “Oh, I’ve got something that might suit that.” And the next thing you knew he’d be standing there with a piece of paper in one hand, wrapped around the microphone stand, with his head down, making the melodies work. We’d never hear what he was singing about in rehearsal because the equipment was so shit. In his case it didn’t matter because he delivered the vocal with such a huge amount of passion and aggression, like he really fucking meant it. It was great. Who cared what he was saying as long as he said it like that. When we were mixing, Rob Gretton always used to say, “Make it go WOOOMPH!” and Ian always did.
Later, of course, I’d listen to the lyrics and try to pick them apart, but for two years in the rehearsal room all I really heard was a scream and that was what was important to me. I just thought, “The guy means it.” It doesn’t matter what you’re playing really, as long as you mean it.
It was only after we recorded Unknown Pleasures that I could hear and begin to take notice of the words, and it was quite startling then to see how they changed between that album, where they were still quite detached and aggressive, to Closer, which is even darker and not detached at all but really introspective and quite frightening—especially of course when you listen to it in light of what later happened.
Still, we hadn’t yet even made an album, but because we were being so productive talk turned to making one. There was a feeling that we had enough material—enough good material—to do it, and to be perfectly frank with you, we weren’t that fussy about who we made it with. As far as we were concerned, there were a lot of record companies out there and they all did pretty much the same thing, which was got records out.
Despite the fact that none of us had a fondness for London—as a place or for the record labels—we all assumed we’d end up following that well-worn path and going there. Which seemed perfectly natural to us—desirable, really—because we were in a band. Nobody starts a band so they can stay in their hometown. You yearn for London and Paris and America and all that—all the freedom that comes with it. We weren’t really loyal to any Manchester scene. We’d always been a bit outside it anyway.
Out of all of us it was Rob, of course, who was much more pro-Manchester. Everywhere was important, not just London, he said: “Fuck London”—that was one of his favorite catchphrases. We’ll do what we do here, build up a following in Manchester. We were resistant at first but he worked his magic on us (in other words, he browbeat us until we would have said anything just to make him stop, but the idea did grow on us). Lucky it did, because in retrospect he was right—absolutely right.
So Rob went into talks with Tony about doing our record with him. The deal was a 50-50 split with the label to pay for recording and manufacture. (In actual fact, the deal was a mistake for Tony and Factory. He’d forgotten about what we call “mechanical royalties.” So for reasons that are too boring to go into, it meant that the deal was 58 percent to 42 percent in our favor: a bone of contention for years.) The deal was great on the one hand, but had a drawback: there would be no advance, so we couldn’t give up our jobs. Rob didn’t have a job, of course, but he knew that us giving up our jobs would be best for the band, giving us the freedom and time to concentrate on making music. So with the Factory offer on the table he started fishing around, making inquiries. One of the bites he had was from Genetic, a part of Radar Records, which in turn was a part of Stiff Records. They had a good reputation. They offered us a multi-album deal and a £70,000 advance. That was so much money it was hard to comprehend.
We were like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, yes!”
Okay: me, Bernard, and Steve were like, “Whoa, yes!” Rob, being nothing if not a man of many contradictions, had a sudden change of heart and decided he didn’t like the idea of an advance. They were like loans, he said. Fuck loans.
“If you take this advance, you’ll be signed to them for five albums and if you don’t like them and they don’t work, it’s going to be a problem for your next four, isn’t it?”
Which was absolutely true, and the £70,000 would have included recording costs as well; split between the five of us it maybe wasn’t such a great deal after all. He convinced us of this, probably in his normal intimidating way, and he did it every time we came to do our publishing deals too, insisting: no advance. Ian would be screaming at him, and me and Barney would be screaming at him, and Steve would probably whisper something as well, but he’d never budge. He’d push his glasses up his nose and go, “We’re better off getting a bigger deal at the back end.”
Of course he hated London. From the day he was born till the day he died, he hated London. So naturally it really appealed to him to stay in Manchester and have control, because Tony was offering more or less complete freedom musically. We could do what we wanted.
So poor old Rob at this point—it must have done his head in: Genetic was in London offering an advance, and he hated London and distrusted the advance, but . . . his band could give up their jobs. Factory was in Manchester and was offering the split, and he loved Manchester and thought the split was best in the long-term, but . . . his band would have to stay working.
His band, don’t forget, with the lead singer who suffered from epilepsy, who really needed as much rest as possible.
So there was plenty of umming and ahhing. In the meantime Martin Rushent invited us down to the studio to record some demos, just to see if we were going to gel. He’d produced the Buzzcocks and the Stranglers by this point, so we were very excited by the prospect and went down there.
Rushent was based in offices above the Blitz Club on Great Queen Street, where he’d been monitoring the early appearances of the major players in the burgeoning New Romantic scene. His assistant, Anne Roseberry, had seen Joy Division in Manchester and told Rushent about it; Rushent in turn saw them and said, “My jaw hit the floor.” Keen to try them out for his own label, Genetic, he invited them to his Berkshire studio, Eden.
When we got there, we saw that Martin Rushent had a brand-new Jaguar XJS—and as it happened I’d been reading this article about how nine out of ten Jag owners don’t lock the boot of their car.
So I thought, I wonder if that’s true . . . Tried his boot and, lo and behold, it was unlocked. When I looked inside it was full of stolen car radios; you could tell they were stolen by the way the wires were dangling off from where they’d been ripped out.
Me and Terry were looking at each other, thinking, Fuck, Martin’s got a boot full of stolen car radios. And then, Wonder if he’d miss a couple . . .
All day, actually, whenever there was a break in the recording, we’d be daring one another to go back in his boot and nick one each for our cars—because they were proper high-end stereos—but I was going, “Oh no, we can’t, because he might be our record company. We can’t nick fucking cassette players off our record company.”
So we didn’t take any. Christ knows what he was doing with them, though. We never asked him, and anyway he was too busy moaning about the boil on his bum. It was giving him real gyp and he was in agony with it. So much that he couldn’t sleep in his bed and had to sleep in his car instead—couldn’t get comfortable otherwise.
He went on about that a lot, his boil, and it meant he kept having to get up to walk around and ease the pain, but otherwise the session was great. It was a really nice studio and he worked well with Ian on the vocals, did a few overdubs and stuff, nothing wild, very low key. The tracks were “Glass,” “Transmission,” “Ice Age,” “Insight,” and “Digital.” He was a nice guy; we got on well. He was a lot better than Martin Hannett in one respect: he spoke English and you could understand what he said. But he was nowhere near as exciting or unpredictable and, to be honest, once I’d heard the results I much preferred Hannett’s production to his.
I got offered the tape of that session back, recently. Eden Studios was taken over by a firm of solicitors, and left in a storeroom, hidden in the bowels of it, were the Joy Division master tapes. One of the staff found them. He got in touch with me through a third party to offer me the tape. He wanted £50,000 for it and I just thought, Oh, fuck off. This was in 2006 or something. Even then there was no way on earth you could make a record and hope to recoup fifty grand. I offered him a finder’s fee, two grand, but he said no and I’ve never heard from him since; it’s never appeared, so I don’t know what’s happened to that one. They used monitor mixes for the Eden versions on the Heart and Soul box set, but I was offered the twenty-four-track master tapes, so it could have been remixed. Shame, because as far as I know the only Joy Division multi-track that still exists is for “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
Ah well. It’s a funny thing, people trying to sell you back bits of your own past, but I’m getting used to it, to be honest. We have the same problem even with studio staff. When Strawberry Studios closed, someone spirited a load of master tapes straight from the trash to their parents’ loft. I caught them hawking the tapes round a few Joy Division collectors. They wanted £20,000. I patiently explained how you can’t make any money these days, what with illegal downloading and so on, and offered the usual £2,000 finder’s fee. They sneered, “I’d rather deal with Steve and Gillian!” I instigated legal proceedings on that one. But lo and behold, one day, as we were negotiating, their car got broken into and all the tapes and digital copies got stolen. They even had the police-report number. Ah well, the ones that got away. Although in this day and age I challenge any thief to even recognize thirty-year-old recording tapes, let alone know what to do with them. They are huge. Strangely enough, they were hawking the same tapes around again a few months later. The thief must have returned them.