We played a lot with Killing Joke around that time. They were a tough bunch to work with but we became friends, and years later they were the only group ever to ask me to join them. Primal Scream almost did, just changing their minds right at the end: they were worried they’d sound too much like New Order. Anyway, Killing Joke got back together after a long time apart to make an album, Pandemonium, but their bassist, Youth, was getting into production and didn’t want to tour, so I got the call: did I want to play bass on tour with Killing Joke?
Because New Order had split up, and I’d finished doing Revenge, I was at a bit of a loose end; so I decided that at the very least I could listen to the album they wanted me to play. Plus the wages they were offering were very good: a grand per gig. Per gig.
We were actually working together on a German concept album, Freispiel, in Cologne’s Stadgarten Studio; it was a collaboration of rock and avant-garde musicians. We worked with Rüdiger Elze (guitar) and Rüdiger Braune (drums) both from the group Kowalski. Afterward I ended up back at the lads’ hotel. I was drinking then, and doing whatever else was going round—and there was plenty of it going round that night.
In the room were me, Geordie and Jaz, and two girls. We all sat down to listen to their new album and when it was over they stopped, looked at me, and said, “Well? What do you think?” Now, because I was completely off my tits, I said, “I can’t play that shit.”
But I didn’t mean, like, “shit,” like the music was shit. I meant shit, as in “that shit,” meaning the bass, which was the normal, low-end, chord-following rumble, which is just not what I do; I don’t play bass like that. I can’t play bass like that. Not that the album was shit. Far from it. Just that I don’t play “that shit.”
Being off my face, though, I couldn’t get this point across. But Geordie and Jaz were just as wasted as I was, and they weren’t getting it either. They thought I was talking about the album. I wasn’t.
The more I tried to dig myself out of it, the worse it went, until the atmosphere had become really heated and we were getting to our feet. If it wasn’t for the girls breaking it up, we’d have ended up fighting there and then—and they would have kicked the shit out of me. Meaning “the shit.”
Anyway, the situation was defused thanks to the feminine intervention and a couple of weeks later I was surprised to find that the offer still stood. By this time I was thinking that a grand a gig was simply too good an offer to pass up. Fuck it, I’ll follow chords for a grand a gig. So I decided to swallow my pride and play that shit. I got my head round it too, and was starting to look forward to being on the road with Killing Joke. Then I spoke to either Jaz or Geordie and they said that Youth had changed his mind: couldn’t bear to have someone else playing his bass lines, apparently. Yeah, me, I know. . . .
Anyway, as a result of all that me, Jaz, and Geordie decided to do a bit of work as a side-project, and we put six or eight tracks together. We even had meetings with their management, E.G., about setting up a band together. Never got as far as a name, but we were thinking about who we were going to have drumming for us, and I’d even persuaded Jaz that he should do more singing, rather than his normal, more shouty, style, when suddenly it all went quiet. Never heard from them, never got a postcard, a phone call, whatever—complete media blackout. Until one day I started getting PRS royalties on a weird song that I’d never heard of and didn’t remember playing on and it was a Killing Joke song. They’d used me on one of their albums, the cheeky buggers. Saying that, I do hold Jaz and Geordie in the absolute highest regard; not being in a band with them is one of my only regrets in music.
So that was that. They always were a right bunch, though, to be honest, and they’d be jockeying for position on the bill all the time. They were very ambitious and driven; ruthless. I mean, that night at the ULU, they were trying to fuck things up for us. They were trying the old Fast Breeder trick of being the support but going on late so it looked like they were the headliners. Meanwhile, we were having trouble with another support group, from Manchester, called the Smirks, who were aptly named because they were a right bunch of arrogant smirkers. That almost ended in fisticuffs too.
Plus my bass amp blew up while we were sound checking. Of course in those days you didn’t have somebody who would come and fix your gear. You didn’t have a “guitar roadie.” And you didn’t carry spares. What you did was get your manager to ask the support group if you could borrow their amp. Oh, but our support was Killing fucking Joke and the Smirks, and Killing Joke was doing their level best to fuck us right up with all their time-keeping shenanigans, and I’d almost had a fight with the Smurfs, so of course they both refused to help.
It was quite funny, really: because I’d done so badly at school I knew nothing about electronics when I joined the band, and when I had to fix the gear I did wish I’d paid more attention in physics. But there I was—I had to take the whole cab apart, hundreds of screws, then check the wiring, which was okay. Shit, one of the speakers had blown.
As I was doing that, Killing Joke came on. I was stuffed in the back of the cab, with the Joke sound checking more loudly than usual, it seemed, me holding a soldering iron and trying to see with a cigarette lighter. I ended up rewiring the cab and managed to get through the gig. Fuck me, that was traumatic.
Not quite as traumatic as what happened next, though, because it was around this time that Ian started cutting himself up.
After getting back from the European tour he’d apparently downed a bottle of Pernod and slashed himself with a knife—a fucking kitchen knife. We talked to him about it in practice afterward.
“What the fuck did you do that for, Ian, you daft bastard?”
“Oh, it was just one of those things,” he said, shrugging. “I got pissed and got carried away. You know . . .”
“Yeah, yeah . . .”
But, actually, no. I didn’t know.
Of course—you know what I’m going to say. We brushed off the fact that he’d added self-harming to the list. We avoided the subject. We carried on like everything was all right and pretended that Ian wasn’t ill, wasn’t struggling with the responsibility of the band, and didn’t have some heavy, heavy affairs-of-the-heart stuff to contend with. We carried on. With Ian’s blessing we carried on; Ian, who out of all of us most wanted us to taste the fruits of success and didn’t want his illness to get in the way; Ian, who always buoyed us up after a bad review or a shit show. Who, even though he was the front man and the focal point, always insisted that we were a group, who used to say, “All I do is the words and sing. The others do the music.”
Because that’s the thing, and I can’t say it enough: nobody wanted the group—the whole group—to do well more than Ian did. So he lied. Either to us, or to himself, or both. He lied when he said that it was no big deal to get pissed and start carving away at yourself with a knife.
He was having fits more frequently, too. He’d have a fit at gigs. There was one when he just froze, mid-strum on his guitar. Another one when he fell into the drum kit and was thrashing around; Steve played on as Ian kicked his drums out from beneath him and Twinny and Terry rushed on to haul him off the stage. Another where he kicked the flight case the synthesizer was on and sent it spinning off the stage. More than anything Ian hated having a fit onstage and I can see why. Being at your most vulnerable, just flipping out like that, with some of the audience laughing, some scared, some cheering, some thinking you’re a freak. It must have been horrible. But we’d stop him from swallowing his tongue and he’d get up, tell us he was fine, and, well, you know the rest.
It got so that recording our next album was almost a break. Almost.