“The twats were flicking the V’s up at us”
The gig had been organized by Martin Hannett, who by then had formed a promotions company called Music Force. We were supposed to be headlining, but when we got there the other band were sound checking first. This was Fast Breeder. They were from South Manchester and they were shit, absolute fucking rubbish. They went, “No, no, no: we’re headlining; we’re headlining!” and we were going, “No, no: we’re headlining; fuck off. We arranged it with Martin Hannett!” and before you know it we were all having a massive row, us lot saying we should be sound checking first because we were on last, them lot saying the same, all squaring up to each other. Well, me and Ian were, while the rest of the group stayed out of it, which was pretty much how it went for the rest of our career, come to think of it. Only Ian ever got involved in arguing and then only if he’d had a few.
Anyway, me and Ian were squaring up to them, secretly shitting it because they were much bigger than us, when their manager got involved. A black guy wearing a flat cap, he looked quite tasty and we were thinking, “We’d better be careful here . . .” and it turned out to be Alan Erasmus, who later became a partner in Factory and who was indeed very tasty. I think he threatened to throw Peter Saville out of a window once. Can’t blame him for that, though: Peter can be very annoying sometimes.
To our immense credit we didn’t back down and, with neither side budging, we decided to phone the promoter, Martin. I went to the back, where the pay phone was, called, and found him very laid back about it all, like he’d been smoking, just going, “You know what, it doesn’t make much difference really,” which was easy for him to say. There was pride at stake here.
I went back and said, “Right, Martin’s just confirmed. We’re headlining.”
Then some twat from Fast Breeder went, “I’m not having that. I’m not having that!” And he stormed off to the phone, came back and said, “Martin says that we’re headlining.”
So Ian went back to the pay phone to try Martin again, but by this time he’d stopped answering; so we carried on arguing until they eventually backed down—or seemed to—and agreed that we were headlining so we should sound check. So we did. Then they set up their gear. But what they did—and this is a trick I’ve seen repeated many times since, a really sneaky one—they did their sound check then fucked off, leaving their gear onstage.
They were supposed to be on at half-nine. Support band: half past nine. That’s the way it goes. But at half nine they weren’t there. Their roadies were assuring us that the band was on their way but it was all a ruse. In the end they came back really late—about the time of the headline slot, funnily enough, so it looked like they were headlining—did their set and by the time they came off most of the audience had gone home. The twats were flicking the V’s up at us as they packed up.
By now the place was nearly empty. One of the few left was a punk girl called Iris with her friend Pauline. I’d seen them around, and I’d been talking to them while we were waiting for Fast Breeder to turn up. We got together that night, started going out, ended up having two lovely kids and stayed together for ten years. Saying that, I was away for eight-and-a-half of them.
Anyway, while I was chatting up the future mother of my kids, Ian had been knocking the beers back. All of us were fucked off at being kept waiting, but he was the only one who showed it by getting pissed. Really pissed, he was. So pissed that a couple of songs into the set he suddenly jumped off the stage and upended a table. Glass went everywhere. We played on. Maybe he’d come back . . . Then he tipped up another table. He’d stopped singing, of course: too busy going berserk. He picked up a third table, smashed it on the dance floor and the top sliced off, sending shards of it everywhere that nearly hit Iris.
Still we played on. We were looking at one another, like, “What the fuck? He seemed so nice . . .” as Ian threw himself to the floor and began writhing around in the broken glass, cutting himself in the process. Any remaining audience members were either scared half to death or laughing at him, while we were just freaked out. This was our mate going mental here. In the end he returned to the stage and we finished the gig, watching as what was left of the crowd scarpered rather than risk another outburst. Nobody fancied being pelted with more broken glass or bits of broken table. It was one of our worst gigs ever.
Looking back, I think there was a bit of showmanship involved. Ian was really into Iggy and always pushing us in that direction musically. But I think this was a time that he took on the physicality of Iggy too, prompted partly by him being pissed and partly by this huge fallout with Fast Breeder. Even so—even knowing where it was all coming from—it was a massive shock to see him like that. We’d witness other examples of it, of course, when he’d lose his temper—usually when he was pissed—and start screaming and shouting. But that was the first time.
That was Steve Brotherdale’s first gig with us—what an initiation. His second was at Tiffany’s in Leicester, when he blotted his copybook with us all by coming to the front of the stage, bringing his high-hat with him, and then playing said high-hat. Ian just looked at him with his gob hanging open then told him to get the fuck back, which he did. But the writing was on the wall from that moment on.
He was still with us for our very first recording session: the Warsaw demo, which we did at Pennine Sound Studios, a converted church on Ripponden Road in Oldham. We’d pooled what money we had to buy some recording time and in we went, green as you like. Paul the engineer walked us through the process: he’d mike it all up, sound check, and we’d record it all in one take, no overdubs. He listened back. “Great. There’s your master, lads.” Five tracks—“Inside the Line,” “Gutz for Garters,” “At a Later Date,” “The Kill,” and “You’re No Good for Me”—all done in three or four hours, which was all we could afford.
“Inside the Line” and “The Kill” were Ian’s; “Gutz for Garters,” “At a Later Date,” and “You’re No Good for Me” were mine. Listening back now you can hear what a punk band we were then. “You’re No Good for Me” in particular was proper sub-Buzzcocks rubbish. Just about the only indication to our future sound was “The Kill,” which we later rerecorded during the Unknown Pleasures sessions, when it sounded very different indeed. Overall, the demos were the sound of a band still finding its feet, but “The Kill” still showed that we were getting somewhere. More important, for the time being at least, we now had demo tapes we could use to try to get lots more gigs outside of Manchester.
Terry, still our manager, had the job of copying the demos and sending them out to venues. The idea was that he’d ring the venue a bit later, find out what they thought of the tape, and see if they’d give us a spot. “All right, it’s Terry Mason, manager of Warsaw—just wondered what you thought of the demo I sent you?” That sort of thing.
But every time he rang someone he was getting the same reaction.
“Terrible.”
“Absolutely shit, mate.”
“Fuckin’ awful.”
So Terry was saying to us, “No one wants you, lads. They all say you’re shit,” which we couldn’t understand because other groups who were much shitter than us (like the Drones, for example) were getting gigs out of town. Us? Nothing.
So I said to Terry, “Terry, give us one of them tapes and let me have a listen to it, and make sure it’s all right.”
He went, “All right, Hooky, here y’go,” and fished one of out his jacket, one of those tapes you get—or used to get—in a pack of three; TDK, something like that. I put it on in the car and it started off okay. Bit muffled, a little distant, but you could hear my bass, Barney sawing away, Steve Brotherdale doing the business, Ian doing his punky singing—yet to fully develop his baritone, of course; still doing the punky shouting back then but sounding great. We’re sounding like a band, a good band. The kind of band you’d want playing at your venue, surely. . . .
Then suddenly I heard the theme tune to Coronation Street drown it all out. And next I hear this voice, Terry’s mum, Eileen, saying, “Come on now, Terry, your tea’s ready. . . .”
Now, back then the only way you could record tape-to-tape was by using two little flat cassette players, put speaker-to-speaker, which was what Terry had been doing. But the dozy bugger had been recording them while he was watching telly and waiting for his mum to do his tea. No wonder no one wanted to book us.
So Terry stopped being our manager and became our road manager, or head roadie or whatever, and we started doing the managing ourselves. We sent out new demo tapes, made some calls and sure enough we got some bookings—the first being for Eric’s in Liverpool. Result. Except our drummer up and left.
Rob Gretton was a high-profile member of the Manchester music scene. He’d missed the two Pistols concerts, having been on a kibbutz in Israel with long-term partner Lesley Gilbert, but on his return became involved with Slaughter & the Dogs and helped to finance their first single, “Cranked Up Really High” (produced by Martin Hannett, then working as Martin Zero). Next he produced a fanzine, Manchester Rains, before setting up Rainy City Records, which released the one and only EP by the Panik, It Won’t Sell. He had also promoted Siouxsie & the Banshees at the Oaks in Chorlton.
We didn’t yet know Rob, but he was already doing us a favor in a weird kind of way—because for some insane reason the Panik asked Steve Brotherdale to join them and off he went. They were a lot punkier than us, and he was a hard, fast drummer, so he suited them, plus he thought they had more potential than we did. He probably regrets leaving us—well, he must regret leaving us—but looking back I don’t think he would have lasted anyway. He was the right drummer for that phase of the band, but not for the sound we were moving toward.
Anyway, off he went to join the Panik and I barely saw him after that. He stayed around, because after the Panik he joined a band called V2. After V2 faded away, well, I went in a McDonald’s about ten years ago, ordered a quarter pounder (no ketchup, no cheese) and medium fries, and the guy serving me went, “Hooky?”
And I went, “Yeah?”
He said, “Don’t you remember me? Steve Brotherdale.”
There he was. Let that be a lesson to you.
The next I heard of him was in 2009 in the Manchester Evening News, when he was banged up for stalking his ex-wife, sad to say.
Anyway—we needed a new drummer. What a ball-ache.
We placed more ads. Put one in Virgin Records in Piccadilly, where we used to buy our records, and Ian put one up in Jones Music Store in Macclesfield, which was where Steve saw it.
Steve was Stephen Morris. He contacted the number on the advert and arranged an audition, which took place in a classroom at the Abraham Moss Centre in Cheetham Hill, a community center we were using for rehearsals at the time.
The first thing we noticed about him was that he was dressed like a geography teacher, right down to the patches on the elbows of his jacket. The second thing: that he was nervous as hell. Smoking. Shaking. Me and Barney were looking at each other, like, Oh my God, he’s a shivering wreck.
Still. After we’d shifted tables, we set up our gear and cranked up. You know exactly what I’m going to say now: he was mega, an absolute revelation. He had all that power that we were looking for but with a texture we hadn’t heard before. Most drummers just hammer it out. Steve was playing the drums. You could tell he’d been playing with a jazz trio, because it was as though he’d somehow combined the feel and intricacy of jazz with the power and energy of rock and punk. We were over the moon. At last, we had a drummer: a drummer straight from the drummer genie who was not only brilliant but also had his own kit and his own car. Steve worked for his dad’s plumbing firm, G Clifford Morris in Macclesfield, so he was on a good wage, and the car came with the job. He seemed a nice bloke, too, very witty and dry, and if it pissed him off that Barney’s mate Dr. Silk called him Son of Forsyth because of his big chin—a nickname that stuck—well, he was gracious enough not to show it.
On the other hand, he was very closed-off. Musically we were fine: we clicked and went on to become one of the best rhythm sections in music history. But on the personal side I never got to know him properly, not in all the years we worked together. I’m very direct and he’s not. I’m a working-class yobbo; he’s an English eccentric. I like change; he doesn’t.
It’s quite funny really, because even at that early stage of the band we were all pretty distant from one another. Me and Barney—once best mates—had fallen out after a motor-biking holiday in the south of France we went on with Danny Lee and Stuart Houghton, when I’d ended up playing the middleman between the two sets of mates. That was bad enough, but the whole thing went tits-up when Stuart crashed his bike, spent all his money on medical bills, and then, when his bike finally expired, needed cash to get home. Let’s just say that, when it came to helping out, Barney wasn’t very helpful: “It’s my holiday. Why should he spoil it?”
After that I couldn’t really look at him the same way. When I got back I just hung out with Terry and Twinny—the roadies, in other words—because they were my mates. Twinny I’d met in the Flemish Weaver and got to know him over a beer. But then a couple of days later when I said hello at the bar he was really fucking rude, looked at me like I was off my head, and told me to fuck off. I went back to my corner moaning about it to Greg Wood, like, “That fucking Twinny’s a weird one, isn’t he? I had a good crack with him the other night and he’d just told me to do one.”
“Why do you think he’s called Twinny?” said Greg. “That’s his twin, y’dickhead.”
Ah . . .
He ended up being our roadie—the Karl Twinny did, while the Paul Twinny became a good friend once I got to know him—and mostly I hung around with him and Terry and Platty on the Precinct. Barney ended up becoming quite close to Ian—when he and Sue did eventually get married, in October 1978, they invited Ian and Debbie but not me and Iris, which goes to show how far we’d drifted apart by then—and Steve, well, he was Steve, an island of Steve. He was with his girlfriend Stephanie until he got together with Gillian, and then it was Steve and Gillian, “the other two.” That was pretty much how the alliances went for the rest of our careers together. I mean, I loved them as bandmates—I loved the group—thought they were great musicians and we really clicked as songwriters. But as people? As friends? Not really. We were individuals, me, Steve, and Bernard. The glue that held us together, the driving force of the band, was Ian. Us three were concentrating on just our bits, with him holding it all together. That’s why we never really looked at his lyrics until after he’d died. It was because we were all just concentrating on doing our bit. Three little musical islands with Ian pulling us all together.
The story of how New Order began is for another time, but it was hard to write songs without Ian because the spot we looked to for help was empty. Rob Gretton was our manager by then, so he became the glue that held us together—as people, at least—but when he died of a heart attack in 1999, well, that left nobody. And it’s been downhill ever since—until, at the time of writing, it’s as bad as it could possibly be.
Joy Division and then New Order were ships that needed captains, but our captains kept on dying on us.