We had a break from the Buzzcocks tour to do our next gig, which was at Plan K in Brussels, a big arty happening with a William Burroughs reading, screenings of films, Joy Division, and Cabaret Voltaire. We were almost late getting there because Terry was driving the van. The thing was, Terry, Twinny, and Dave Pils got on really badly sometimes, always bickering, and it was only me that kept them from battering each other. But now that we were a proper professional band with paid road crew (in other words, them) I didn’t drive the van anymore so I didn’t travel with the crew; I went in Steve’s Cortina. Luxury. But it did mean that the Three Stooges didn’t have anyone to keep them apart; and on the day we left for Brussels they must have had some massive fallout because Terry was in a bad mood, and because he was in a bad mood he was driving at Miss Daisy speeds down the motorway and kept pulling over. Never the most competent of drivers, he was telling me that he couldn’t get the van to go over thirty miles an hour and I ended up replacing him in the driver’s seat and flooring it down the motorway rather than risk missing the ferry. I got it up to eighty, though, and we made it to Brussels, which was dead exciting—the first time we’d traveled outside the UK.
Somehow we found Michel Duval, the organizer, who took us to the hotel and we were buzzing—even more so at the thought of the luxurious Brussels hotel he was bound to have chosen for us.
Except when we got there it wasn’t a hotel. It wasn’t even a B&B. It was a youth hostel. Instead of having rooms with two sharing, which is what we were used to, we had to sleep in this huge dormitory. We grabbed the best beds. Steve, being too slow, got one with a big lump in it where the springs had broken and when he lay on it he was all bent over; Barney was already complaining that he wouldn’t be able to get any kip, being such a light sleeper, even though it had never seemed to bother him before; while Ian took one look at the setup and went off to try to wangle a bed elsewhere—which he did, with Cabaret Voltaire in their normal, nice room, before returning to rub our noses in it.
With our sleeping arrangements sorted we went to the gig, which was at this huge, amazing “art space,” I suppose you’d have to say. We did our bit and it was really good gig, and afterward me, Ian, and Barney went along to see William Burroughs then stood around as he sat at a table signing books.
Ian was a bit awestruck, but poor, so he couldn’t afford to buy one of the books William Burroughs was signing. “I’m going over to ask him if I can have a book,” he said, after standing there for ages looking over at the table like a kid eyeing up a plate of warm pies or something.
Me and Barney thought this was hilarious. I mean, looking at William Burroughs, how grizzled and world-weary he looked, he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was in the habit of handing out freebies to oiks from Macclesfield. Still, Ian had sunk a couple of Duvels and was feeling brave and we were winding him up something rotten. So when there was a lull in visitors to William Burroughs’s table he strolled over, ignoring us two, who went and hid behind a pillar nearby, sniggering.
“Oh hello, Mr. Burroughs,” he said, “I’m a big fan of yours, and . . .”
William Burroughs looked at him and growled. “Yeah, kid, yeah. Whatever.”
He’d probably been hearing that all night—from people who were at least buying his books.
“Well, I’m in the band Joy Division who played tonight . . .”
“Yeah, kid, yeah. Whatever,” growled William Burroughs.
“Well, I was wondering if I could have a book?”
“Have a book?” snapped William Burroughs.
“Yeah.”
He looked at Ian. “Fuck off, kid,” he said, and Ian slunk away, tail between his legs, as we wet ourselves laughing. We then spent the rest of the night growling, “Fuck off, kid,” at Ian—whose response was to get really, really pissed.
He wasn’t the only one. Twinny: also absolutely pissed. I found him outside and instead of loading our gear into the back of the van he’d raided the bar and had stacked the van full of stolen beer. We made him put it all back so we could get the gear in, so we could return to the youth hostel. When we got there, it was absolute carnage. Back in the dorm, Twinny discovered this Belgian guy asleep in his bed.
“Oi, you, fuck off!” he was shouting, just hollering at the bloke, who in return looked terrified, like a rabbit in the headlights. Twinny was advancing on him and would probably have grabbed the guy if I hadn’t stepped between them.
“Twinny,” I said, “he can’t understand you, y’daft bastard. He’s a Belgian. You’ll have to speak French to him.”
Twinny looked at me, nodded, and went to the guy, “Oi, you. Fucky offy.”
Poor bloke just got out of bed and legged it, by which time the lot of us were in absolute hysterics and there was no stopping us. Ian was laughing because he was going off for a good night’s kip in Cabaret Voltaire’s room and it was obvious that things in our dorm were only going to get more out of control. Barney was moaning about something then started having a fight with Twinny, but Twinny got carried away and upended Barney’s bed, with him on it, so Barney came flying off and hit his head on a radiator. That completely enraged him, so he picked up a bottle of orange squash, smashed the end off on the radiator, and poured it all over Twinny’s bed. Twinny’s response was to smash open two bottles of Duvel and pour them on Barney’s bed, by which point we were telling them both to calm the fuck down before someone got hurt. Just then Ian got his knob out and started pissing in our ashtray—one of those tall freestanding ashtrays, it was—thinking it was hilarious, looking back over his shoulder going, “Ha, you wankers, I’m pissing in your room! Ha-ha, pissing in your room!” It was one of those pisses that just seemed to go on and on forever, like a donkey’s, and we were calling him a dirty bastard when a caretaker walked into the room flanked by two security goons.
The guy went berserk. Ian wasn’t smiling anymore. He was trying to stuff his cock back into his trousers and at the same time pacify the caretaker, who was turning all shades of purple, calling Ian in French what we’d just been calling him in English, except that now Ian didn’t think it was at all funny.
“I don’t understand French,” he was saying. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand French. Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”
Whatever it was he did to calm the caretaker down, I don’t know, but he did, and the festivities continued and next thing I passed out, one arm hanging out of the bed.
Next morning we woke up in this wreckage of a dorm, with orange and Duvel and Ian’s piss everywhere, hungover to shit, desperately needing something to eat and ending up in what we thought was a burger bar. There we spent the last of our money on seven burgers, which they handed us to eat raw. Turned out to be horse meat, and of course none of us could eat it so we went hungry.
Which served us all right, I suppose.
That was our Belgium jaunt. On our return home we went straight back on tour with the Buzzcocks, but somewhere in the middle of all that madness we found time to record what would go on to become one of our best-known tracks, “Atmosphere,” which we did for Licht und Blindheit, a French-territory-only EP. Who puts one of their best songs on a limited-edition single available only in France? Us, that’s who.
“Atmosphere” is a massive song. A lot of people say it’s their favorite Joy Division song, but it’s not mine; it reminds me too much of Ian, like it’s his death march or something, and it figures that it’s one of the most popular songs to play at funerals: Robbie Williams has got “Angels” for weddings and we’ve got “Atmosphere” for funerals. Becky says that when I die she’s going to play “Atmosphere” at my funeral—but by Russ Abbott. Thanks, love.
So no, “Atmosphere” isn’t my favorite. If you were to ask me what was, it would have to be “Insight.” I mean, it might change tomorrow, but it’s “Insight” right now because it’s just so simple but so powerful—and it doesn’t have a chorus. That was one of the things I really liked about Joy Division, that the songs didn’t have to have a chorus or a middle eight. I used to love it about New Order, too, until we started to get all formal about the writing, until by the end every song had a verse, chorus, and middle eight, which to me just made everything bland.
But “Insight” doesn’t have all that. To me it’s the sound of a group of young musicians working out the possibilities of what they can do, and working them out together. Changing the world. It reminds me of a time when writing music was easy but most of all fun.
The release of the “Transmission” seven-inch in October had proved to be a disappointment for Tony Wilson, who had hoped that its chorus of “Dance, dance, dance to the radio” would win it radio airplay. Plans to hire a radio plugger were shelved at the insistence of Rob Gretton and Martin Hannett, who felt that to promote the single went against the Factory ethos. As a result, and despite critical acclaim, just three thousand of the ten thousand copies ordered by Wilson were sold. Rob Gretton was to orchestrate the band’s next act of commercial defiance, striking a deal with French label Sordide Sentimental. Set up in France in 1978 by Jean-Pierre Turmel and Yves Von Bontee, it had piqued his interest with a superbly packaged release of Throbbing Gristle’s “We Hate You (Little Girls),” and a deal was made to release two Joy Division songs in similar fashion: “Atmosphere” and “Dead Souls,” produced by Martin Hannett during sessions at Cargo in October. Finally released in March 1980, The Licht und Blindheit EP was limited to just 1,578 copies, mail-order only, with most fans having to content themselves with taping it from the John Peel program.
The tracks that Throbbing Gristle put out on Sordide Sentimental were never going anywhere else. I mean, they were harsh even by the standards of Throbbing Gristle. Whenever I put that EP on, my cat used to run out of the room. Us? We put two of our best songs on it. On a limited edition that we never even got any money for. The run was 1,578 copies; I found out years later that 1578 was also the last date the French beat the English in a war.
Having said that, it didn’t bother us at the time—this came during a period when we were continually writing great songs, so it didn’t seem like such a big deal, to be honest. And, looking at it in terms of the whole Joy Division story, well, it’s just “us” isn’t it? That special attitude championed by Rob and accepted by Tony that was either total naïveté, utter stupidity, incredible foresight, or a weird mix of all three. I honestly don’t know. I mean, people said we were mad at the time—other bands and their managers, I mean. But Rob loved it. He loved being bloody-minded and contrary and he liked nothing better than winding up Tony.
“Atmosphere” was originally written in two halves. The bass and drums was one idea—me and Steve came up with it together. The vocals and the keyboards was another idea. We’d been working on them separately, just tinkering with them, really, then put them together and got the song that we called “Chance,” featuring our Woolies organ borrowed from Barney’s gran.
It would be a few years yet before we got overdrawn at the riff bank. This was the time, after all, that we also wrote “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and ended up recording it for the first time as part of a second John Peel session in November. It was a song we’d written during rehearsals at TJ’s. I had the riff, Steve built the drum part, and Ian mumbled some words then said he was going to go home and write some lyrics for it, which he did, using the bass riff as the melody for the chorus. But Christ, if he’d written that song about me I’d have been heartbroken. I’m not sure who it was written about. I never asked. But whoever it was deserves all of his money just for that.