London was still a big and sexy place to us, so it was always a bit of a thrill to play there, and to get a gig at the Nashville Rooms was extra-special. After all, that was where the Pistols had their famous concert that got them in NME that I saw in the car park at Newquay, which inspired me to go to see them, et cetera, et cetera.
It turned out to be one of those brilliant gigs, because this this was the first time I remember seeing the audience mouthing along with the words—and that is a really Whoa moment when you’re in a band. Quite an odd sensation, really, when you think of where the song has come from—the four of you freezing your arses off in TJ Davidson’s—to see that it’s traveled all that way. It’s sort of thrilling and embarrassing at the same time.
So it was a storming gig, apart from the fact that halfway through a guy climbed out of the audience—a punk who got up onstage. We thought, This guy’s come up to have a dance or whatever, and kept on playing, but he sauntered right past us and went back to where the dressing room was.
We were looking at one another, like, What the fuck’s he playing at? but still playing, when a couple of minutes later he reappeared and went to climb down off the stage back into the crowd. I stopped him. Still playing, I said, “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Oh, I just went for a piss,” he said.
I said, “In our fucking dressing room? You cheeky get,” and kicked him right offstage.
Fast-forward to about twenty years later, and this guy comes up to me, can’t remember where it was, and says, “Hello.”
“All right, mate,”
He said, “I saw you when you were Joy Division, at the Nashville Rooms in London. I was with my friend, who got up onstage and went for a piss in the dressing room, and you kicked him offstage.”
“Yeah, I remember him,” I said. “The cheeky bastard.”
He said, “Yeah, well, he ended up hanging himself.”
I went, “Oh. Fuck. He didn’t hang himself because of that, did he?”
“Oh, no, not because of that. It was a few years after that.”
I said, “Well thank fuck for that!” Which I realize wasn’t the most sensitive response but I just had this image, you know?
Anyway, back to the gig. What used to happen when we packed the van after a gig was that Twinny would arrange all the gear so he could lie on the bass cab in a sleeping bag (not Barney’s) and sleep all the way home. He wasn’t there for that particular gig, though, which he was absolutely gutted about because it was one of the first gigs he’d ever missed. But we managed without him and, after the gig, packed the van and set off, me ahead of Steve, who had strict instructions to stay behind me because I was worried about the van not making the journey.
Knackered, it was, the van. We’d lost the petrol cap and someone—not me—had replaced it with a rag to stop the petrol from evaporating. Trouble was, the rag was merrily disintegrating and every so often would block the filter on the carburetor and stop it from working. I could always tell when it was going to happen because the van started to slow down gradually, which it had been doing on the way to London that day. There was no power in it at all. And I knew that when I got home I’d have to take the air filter off, take the carburetor off, take it apart, renew all the gaskets, clean the main jet, put it back together again, put fucking everything back on, and then it would work fine for a while. What a job.
But first I needed to get home, and I was seriously doubting the van would make the trip. It was going really slowly, about thirty miles an hour top speed. We were pottering home. Next to me Terry fell asleep. I looked in my mirror and could see Steve but he’d dropped quite far behind; there was just me and him on the motorway, as it often was in those days, especially in the early hours of the morning.
We’d just joined the M5 when I started to feel sleepy. Terry was snoring away beside me and I couldn’t see Steve in the mirror anymore. The next thing I knew there was this huge bang and the van suddenly shot forward so hard that my head hit the divider and for a second I was seeing stars, just barely aware of thinking that the carb must have suddenly cleared because our speed suddenly increased, at the same time feeling the van spin around and the pain. That and a massive squealing of tires.
I must have been dazed. Because when I got my vision back we were sitting on the hard shoulder, facing the right way, and I thought I was dreaming because a forty-foot lorry was sliding down the motorway past me, sideways on, its tires screeching as it drew to a stop right across the motorway, blocking all three lanes. The next thing I saw was Ian Curtis running down the motorway chasing a drum that was rolling away—a drum that should have been in the back of my van.
My head was still clearing when Ian arrived at the window carrying the tom.
“Are you all right, Hooky? Are you all right?”
“What’s happened?” I said, completely befuddled by the whole thing.
Terry was the same, looking around him in a complete daze. Turned out the forty-footer had hit us at about seventy miles an hour, shunting us and sending us spinning in two complete 360s; it had taken out the back of the van, snapping the back axle and flattening the rear doors. My bass cab had come shooting out the back like a comedy coffin, straight under the wheels of the forty-footer.
Thank God Twinny hadn’t been sleeping on it.
I spent the rest of the night being held back from punching the lorry driver, who was from Manchester but wouldn’t give us a lift back there. We cleared up our gear from the motorway, worrying that the coppers would find out about my bent MOT. I watched as it was towed away. It wasn’t really until the next morning—well, it was the afternoon by the time I woke up—that the reality of it all hit me: the van was history. It was an ex-van. It had ceased to be. No more driving the van for me. From then on either Terry, Twinny, or Dave Pils drove a rented van, and every night after a gig I lived it up with the rest of the band in the bar, boozing and trying to pull girls.
On the one hand, it was absolutely magnificent. On the other hand, I ended up an alcoholic.