Flyer for the last nights at the Electric Circus, Saturday 1 October and Sunday 2 October 1977 (Courtesy of Jon Savage)
Bernard Sumner: You know lead singers are pains in the arse, right? They are, but drummers are just fucking weird.
Peter Hook: They were all arseholes. They probably might say the same about me. We just couldn’t get a decent drummer who fitted in either personality-wise or playing style-wise. Firing people at the tender old age of twenty-one was awful. Invariably Bernard and I would go and meet them and tell them they were too good for us, just to get rid of them. Then we got Steve Brotherdale, who was the best drummer we’d had, but he dumped us for Rob Gretton’s band, the Panik.
Bernard Sumner: We went through several drummers. All we wanted to do was find a nice guy that we got on with and we’d give him the job. We met several superstar drummers. One, I remember, auditioned us: it was basically, ‘If you fulfil certain criteria, I’ll join your group. Like, how much are you going to get paid for a gig? How many times a week are you going to gig? Who’s your manager? What do you think your prospects are?’ He interviewed us like that, and we were like, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and then when he left: ‘Kiss my arse.’
And then we got one who was a student studying to be a PE instructor, and he was a pretty good drummer, but we went round to his student digs and he had like a punk wig and a dog collar on and was practising to be a punk. We just thought, ‘Knobhead, knobhead.’ But we were too nice to sack him, so Hooky had this stupid idea of buying him a box of chocolates and going and telling him he’s too good to be in the group: ‘You’re miles better than we are, you shouldn’t be playing with a group like us.’ That’s how we’d sack people.
Terry Mason: I was still having lessons, because these early gigs, getting and keeping a drummer was very difficult. I thought in time I could pick up drumming, but it wasn’t a situation where there was time, to be honest: with bands like that you don’t know whether the lifespan’s going to be three weeks or three years. We had a guy called Tony Tabac, who did the first couple of gigs. He didn’t really like turning up for rehearsals and seemed to have other things on his mind, so I was basically learning in the background, and still was even when Steve came in.
Stephen Morris: I was in the bar at the Apollo and reading this magazine, and it said, ‘Drummer wanted.’ After the Sunshine Valley Dance Band falling apart, I’d gone to the odd adult audition and hadn’t really been cabaret enough for the job required. I think the best that they said was, ‘Have a few more lessons.’ So, there you go – ‘Drummer wanted.’ There’s two adverts: one was this band called the Fall, and the other one was this band called Warsaw. I didn’t even know who they were.
As a sideline I started to make money reviewing the concerts I was going to for the Record Mirror. You got a cheque for about three quid, but it was Coutts bank and I felt great going into the bank: ‘Look at this, the Queen’s bank.’ My first punk gig was Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds at Rafters. Vini Reilly was playing guitar, and I actually got an interview with Vini and said – this is bog standard – ‘What’s your influences?’ And he said, ‘We’re influenced by revolutionary music of all kinds.’ Right.
Anyway, I got talking to someone at this concert and I asked, ‘Have you heard of Warsaw?’ – ‘Oh, I’ve seen them a couple of times, they’re not much cop.’ I said, ‘What about the Fall?’ – ‘Oh no, no, no, not the Fall.’ So I thought, ‘Well, if I was going to join one of these two bands on the basis of a pissed-up conversation, I’d probably go for Warsaw.’ I’m still sort of umming and ahhing, and then I was walking down the hill to the station and Jones’s music shop had this notice in the window. Again it was the immortal words: ‘Drummer wanted for local punk band, Warsaw.’
And I thought, ‘I see the hand of coincidence in this.’ And it was a Macclesfield phone number, so I thought, ‘Well, you know, don’t have to travel.’ So I get on the phone, expecting some sort of oafish punk type, and it was a very mild-mannered, very chatty Ian, and I said, ‘You know, are you after a drummer?’ – ‘Oh yes. Can you do … play drums?’ – ‘Yes, I can play drums, yes, yes.’ – ‘Oh, do you want to come round to me house?’
He said, ‘The rest of the band are on holiday, but come round and you can listen to a tape.’ And I went round to Ian’s house in Macclesfield, which was only just down the road from where I lived. I’d just given up smoking for the first time – I’d done three weeks smoke-free – and the first thing I got off Ian was being readdicted to cigarettes: ‘One won’t hurt you, come on, come on, one won’t hurt you, come on.’ So that was it then, I was hooked on cigs for another thirty years, and managed to talk myself into a job.
He gave us this tape which they’d recorded at the studio in Oldham, and, ‘Yeah, go and have a listen to it and see what you think.’ And so I went away. It sounded like someone were playing a flute, but of course it wasn’t a flute, it was the way Hooky played bass. It was just a bit strange. So fine, it wasn’t too difficult, there was no 6/4, 7/14 Van der Graaf Generator complicated time signatures in there. I thought I could probably nail this one quite quickly. So, ‘Yeah, okay, I’m in, if you’ll have me.’
I’d been down this way before. I was half expecting to turn up and they’d say, ‘Have a few more lessons, you’ll be all right.’ And he rang us up and said, ‘Oh, they’re back now from the holiday and we’re going to have a rehearsal. Do you want to come?’ So I borrow me mam’s car – I think they’d gone on holiday. I put me drums in the boot, and, ‘Where are we meeting them?’ – ‘Strangeways.’ – ‘Strangeways … prison?’ – ‘Yeah, Strangeways prison.’ – ‘They’ve been on holiday?’ – ‘Yes, they’ve been on holiday.’ – ‘Okay. Where have they been?’ – ‘Oh, France, they’ve been on holiday in France.’
So I parked up outside Strangeways expecting them to come and open the doors, and then this Mark 2 Jag pulls up, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, it’s meeting somebody.’ Bearded chap got out, and that’s Hooky. ‘Oh, he’s got a beard, that’s a bit weird.’ Then Bernard turned up, then we went to Abraham Moss Leisure Centre at Crumpsall and started bashing about and did the songs that were on the tape, and that was it really. I don’t think anyone said, ‘You’ve got the job.’ But they said, ‘Oh, we’ve got a gig next week, can you make it?’ So that was how I got from Macclesfield to Warsaw.
Bernard Sumner: Terry’s a bit of an oddball, so I guess he was drawn to groups that were oddball and outcast like him. He’s gone through many things; he was a guitarist with us at one stage, second guitarist when we rehearsed at The Swan. I noticed after we’d been rehearsing for about a couple of months that you couldn’t hear a single thing he was playing. So I went over to his amp, turned it up so you could actually hear it. Oh God, it was awful, he just couldn’t play, and he said, ‘All right, I can’t play the guitar, I’ll be the drummer.’
It was when we were looking for a drummer. So then he bought this drum kit that was so cheap that the legs were like wire coat hangers, so when you played the drums the legs of the drum kit would walk away from him. In fact, when Steve’s mum wouldn’t let him out of the house because he had a cold and wouldn’t let him take his drum kit, he had to use Terry’s drum kit, which was walking away from him. That caused a bit of political differences within the group, I must say.
Then he became the manager, and the first recording that we made, the one that Ian paid for with his twenty-first-birthday money, it was like, ‘Right, Terry, sounds fucking great, send it out to record companies.’ He sends loads out, and we have a group meeting. ‘Had any response yet?’ We did get a reply off a record company saying thanks but no thanks, give us a call in ten years. So we were like, ‘Shit, fucking hell,’ really dejected, so we put it in the cassette player and played it.
Terry lived with his mum. We heard [makes drum sound] drum beats starting, then we hear [hums Coronation Street theme], then we hear, ‘Terry, your tea’s ready’ [drum sound] going over the music. And we were like, ‘What, you’ve sent it out like that? You’ve got fucking Coronation Street on it and your mum telling you your tea’s ready. How’s that happened? How have you been recording them?’
He said, ‘Well, I sit there, I’m watching telly and I’ve got one tape recorder here with the speaker on it and another one with a microphone, and I just hold the microphone near it.’ So that’s how he’s making tape copies, just off the speaker of the other with a microphone. So it picked Coronation Street up and all sorts of shite, and he sent it out to the record companies. Fucking embarrassing. Then we promoted him to keyboard technician when we got a keyboard, because we never sacked him, we always promoted him.
Peter Hook: I mean, it was this very strange thing, when you think about it, because you couldn’t hear anything, your equipment was dire. I never heard Bernard’s guitar until we got in the studio with Martin Hannett, or Ian’s lyrics, but the feeling was right: ‘[makes guitar noises] That feels right. Don’t know what we’re playing, don’t know what he’s singing, but it feels right.’ It was the same with Steve’s drumming: couldn’t hear it, but it felt right, and the whole thing felt right, which is the interesting thing.
Stephen Morris: I’d spent so long sort of bashing about in me dad’s bedroom. When you played with the cabaret bands, they were just doing their own thing, and you kind of had to fall in with them, and when you tried to do something different, ‘Whoah, whoah, whoah.’ But playing with Hooky and Bernard and Ian, we were all learning off each other. We coalesced really quite quickly and got quite tight. Then the first gig that I had with them was the last night of the Electric Circus.
Peter Hook: At the last night of the Electric Circus, we had a fight with the promoter, and then we nearly had a fight with the Drones cos they wouldn’t let us on. It was that tosser, the singer of the Drones, and Ian kicked off like mad, absolutely mad at the door with the promoter and with the Drones and Slaughter and the Dogs, because they didn’t want us on. They fucking stood there and said, ‘We don’t want you to play.’ We were going, ‘Fuck you, we’ve got as much right to play as you.’ Me and Ian literally had them by the throat.
I think Bernard and Steve were in the car. We had to physically fight to get on. They didn’t want us to play, and that’s why they put us first on. Virgin recorded us while we were just checking the mikes. That’s why it goes off halfway through ‘Novelty’. We only recorded two songs, and I think that once they listened to it afterwards they thought, ‘Oh fuck, these lot are better than most of the other bands that were on.’
The Drones and Slaughter and the Dogs stood there and tried to stop us playing. No one stuck up for us. Bleeding Buzzcocks didn’t stick up for us. It was only us, sheer tenacity and Ian freaking that got us on that day. Ian could go like Krakatoa if something crossed him, and the only time I ever saw him go was when he was sticking up for the band, so it was great.
Stephen Morris: Up to that point I’d thought that they weren’t really punks at all. There’s nothing wrong with not being what I thought punks would be. They were just normal guys. For a singer I thought Ian was quite mild mannered and polite: you’d see Johnny Rotten and people spitting and all that lot, and then Ian’s nothing like that. I didn’t really pay much attention to what would happen when you actually did a gig. We just played and Ian mumbled into the microphone.
I should have suspected something really when we went to sort out playing at the last night of the Electric Circus. The last night actually was two nights, and Ian said, ‘We’ll go down on the Saturday and we’ll sort out about getting on on Sunday.’ We went in. Ian got very loud and aggressive with people on the door. I’d never seen him like that before, he was really aggressive and very passionate, and he got really wound up – ‘Get us on!’ – and eventually I think just to get rid of him they said, ‘Okay, just turn up. You can play first.’
I thought that was a bit strange. And then we turned up with the gear, and they said, ‘Right, you’re on now.’ And all of sudden it’s, ‘Whoah, he’s turned into a whirling Dervish,’ which spurred you on. Bernard and Hooky were playing the Ian sort of manic routine, and it wasn’t a routine, it was passion. That was how he got whatever it was. I got it out of me by hitting drums, and Bernard and Hooky got it out by playing guitars. He got it out of him by doing that, which was just being Ian onstage, and until I saw it, it wasn’t at all what I expected. It was a bit of a revelation.
- 2 October 1977: Last Night of the Electric Circus, Collyhurst, Manchester
Jon Savage review, Sounds, 15 October 1977
Hip disco segues into Warsaw. They look young and nervous. Desperate, thrashing, afraid of stopping/falling: ‘What are you gonna do when the novelty’s gone / You’ll be back in the gutter where you came from’ (‘Novelty’).
Terry Mason: We’d got so far and we were really stuck. At that point, Warsaw had become possibly the most unpopular band in Manchester. No one seemed to have any gigs for us to do. We weren’t even getting last-minute cancellations. ‘The support band at Rafters hasn’t turned up, who have we got on the speed dial?’ We certainly weren’t on the speed dial. We just weren’t getting out of Manchester, and we weren’t getting much traction in Manchester.
The punk explosion was based around Buzzcocks, who were based in Lower Broughton, but the rest of the Manchester scene, the venues were still run by the Didsbury mafia, by C. P. Lee and by people like Bruce Mitchell. We were outside that. People didn’t like us because we weren’t musos. So we were on the wrong side of Manchester and on the wrong side of a number of people, just because a lot of it was down to location.
Richard Boon: What was the Manchester punk thing? Spearheaded by Buzzcocks, and then there was very little until the Fall. There was always rumour and gossip. Bands were forming just for thirty minutes, and never doing anything because they hated each other. It could have been regional, I don’t know. South Manchester was something else. That was kind of ruled by what was left of Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias. Warsaw didn’t hang out in quite the same way as other people hung out. They were very insular, they had their thing going.
C. P. Lee: The Albertos were a kind of Dada cabaret band, and we formed in 1974 in order to fight back against the leviathans of rock. Then, when punk rock came along, it happened to coincide with a stage show that I’d been writing called Snuff Rock, and the idea was that kids were unemployed, nobody wanted to go and see groups any more, they needed a gimmick, and so Snuff Rock was born. The idea was to get an unemployed kid every night, then get them to commit suicide onstage as part of the band, so live or die they’d make a million.
- 7 October 1977: Salford College of Technology
Martin Hannett would come round and say we’re going off to see somebody at such-and-such a place – the Bierkeller, Band on the Wall or whatever – so yeah, I did go out with him quite often to see groups. In a way it was like A&R spotting, because Rabid Records was just beginning, and the reason we went to see Warsaw at Salford was because Slaughter and the Dogs were playing – they were on Rabid Records. There was a fight at the gig, and the evening got kind of curtailed by the brouhaha that was going on.
Within the next few days, Martin was enthusing a lot at Cotton Lane, where Rabid was, but Tosh Ryan was very, very worried about the association with Nazi imagery. I remember Martin saying, ‘This is the dance music of the future,’ and that was Martin’s split-off from Rabid, I think, his pursuit of what he saw as the dance music of the future, and it amazes me, because that was a very un-hippie thing to do. It was some indication of his genius that he saw it even then. They certainly were embryonic, but he recognised something within it.
Martin Hannett: I was a partner in Rabid. It was put together as a vehicle for the Slaughter and the Dogs single, and it got used till we got up to 105, which was Jilted John. 103 was John Cooper Clarke, 102 was the Nosebleeds, 104 was ‘Kinnel Tommy’. Ed Banger was a complete lunatic, but a gentle lunatic. Came from Wythenshawe. He came with the Faal brothers. Mike Faal stuck posters up for Factory. They were part of the Slaughter and the Dogs crew: Vini Reilly, Rob Gretton, me.
Terry Mason used to come into the office looking for a PA, and I went to see them one night supporting Slaughter at Salford Tech. They were really good. The PA broke down, and Steve and Hooky busked for about fifteen minutes. One of the things that drove me to drum machines was the appalling quality of drummers, and Steve was good, so immediately they had a red-hot start. They were different from punk. There was lots of space in their sound initially.
- December 1977: Pennine Sound Studios, recording the Ideal for Living EP
Bernard Sumner: When we made our first record, An Ideal for Living, we didn’t have a manager. We were just making this music and we wanted people to hear it, and it was very much the punk ethos of doing it yourself, independence, forget big labels, forget the superstars, just a cottage-industry kind of thing. It was Ian’s twenty-first-birthday money, and he very bravely and very kindly decided to book studio time with it, and booked us into a studio called Pennine Sound in Oldham.
The guys that were running it offered us a full package. ‘You pay so much, and we do the full package. You record the track here, we’ll mix it for you, and then you’ll get it back on vinyl. We’ll cut it for you and do the artwork and everything.’ So we thought, ‘That’s great, that’s really kind of them, we’ll do that, yeah.’ So we did it and we recorded it, and first time in the studio, ‘[makes noises] Come on, lads, time’s money. You’re running out of time, you’ve only got half an hour left.’
Joy Division, sleeve of An Ideal for Living 7˝ EP, spring 1978 (Gareth Davy)
Peter Hook: I think that was because everybody did it, all the groups did it, and you helped each other to do it. If you needed to know something, you could phone up the Buzzcocks and they’d tell you. They might not crave your company, but they would tell you. You looked after each other, and also with the studios, you’d go along and you’d pay your money, and they’d give you the finished record – which is what they did.
Stephen Morris: That’s after we’d done a few rehearsals. We did the songs on that original cassette, then we wrote some more songs. ‘Novelty’, I think, was an old song on that tape. Then we did ‘Leaders of Men’, ‘Failures’, ‘Warsaw’, ‘No Love Lost’.
We started writing because we could. Ian had the lyrics. The way that the songs happened, they just appeared like out of thin air. We’d just start a song and then finish it, and then, ‘Right, we’ve written another song, we’ll go through the set.’ And so you start: you’d have three songs, four songs, five songs. If you played for longer than twenty minutes, you were overstaying your welcome. Well, that’s what we thought anyway.
‘No Love Lost’ was the start of moving away from thrash. It was an example of, ‘Oh, hang on, we’ve got a good bit here, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Hang on, that’s another good bit, so why don’t we put that bit there and then that bit there’ – which is what Ian was very good at, he could spot things and do bits of arranging. Also, he didn’t mind the fact that he wasn’t singing for a lot of it, because he did like the idea that our intros are our trademarks. The other thing was that the guitar riff in ‘No Love Lost’ is off ‘LA Woman’, which me and Ian thought was really good.
Peter Hook: There was another group in London called Warsaw Pakt that were famous because they’d done a direct-to-disc record. They’d played it in the studio, mixed it into stereo and cut it straight onto a disc, and they got loads of press for doing it. So when we were phoning up for support gigs, everyone started saying, ‘Oh, are you the Warsaw Pakt?’ We should have said, ‘Yeah,’ then we’d have got the gigs, but we didn’t. We just said, ‘No, no, no, we’re Warsaw from Manchester’ – or from Salford.
It just got too much really, so we had to change our name. We were racking our brains looking for other names, and the favourite was the Slaves of Venus and Joy Division. Ian brought it from a book, House of Dolls. It was round about the same time that we decided we were all going to dye our hair blond as a gimmick to get us noticed, and I came into rehearsal the next day with me hair dyed blond, and them three bastards hadn’t done it. I got stuck with it for years and years and years.
Bernard Sumner: We had about a week to come up with a name, and some guy at the animation place where I was working gave me a couple of books. One was called House of Dolls. I knew it was about the Nazis but I didn’t read it. I just flicked through the pages, saw this name Joy Division, and it was the brothel that the soldiers went to, and I thought, ‘Well, it’s pretty bad taste, but it’s quite punk.’
Everyone I told the name to went, ‘That’s a great name,’ so we just went for it. We knew it had connotations, but we just thought, ‘Well, we’re not Nazis, so fuck it, it’s still a great name.’ We were very determined, and it was a bit of ‘Fuck you, we’ll do what we want’ as well in our heads, but I guess it is pretty bad taste.
Stephen Morris: It came out of ‘No Love Lost’. Bits of that were taken from one of Ian’s books that he was reading at the time, which was House of Dolls, which is about how the Joy Division was the regiment of prostitutes looking after the new Aryan super-race or Nazi thugs or whatever. That was what they were called, and it sort of stuck. That was the start of people thinking, ‘Oh bloody hell, they’re a bunch of Nazis.’ I mean, really we should have seen that coming.
Bernard Sumner: I was born in 1956. I lived in my grandparents’ house, and they used to talk about the war all the time. One grandparent’s sister had been bombed, house had gone. We had a room full of gas masks and tin helmets, British flags and old radio sets – paraphernalia from the war. My granddad used to watch war programmes all the time. I was interested in what it was and what had made it happen, because for a young mind like mine it was quite a bizarre thing for the whole world to be up at each other’s throats, and violence on such a mass scale.
Obviously, I thought it was dreadfully wrong what the Nazis had done, but it was like the whole world had gone mad. I think the only way you can deal with that is to study human nature and find out how to take the aggression out of people, because it’s aggression at the end of the day, and it’s also people being macho and not being prepared to stand down.
Living in Salford I saw quite a lot of violence, and so I thought that was part of the norm. I’d seen people getting beaten up with iron bars and people getting the shit kicked out of them. My uncle got stabbed forty times. My cousin got kicked in the face so much his eyeball fell out and he had to walk to hospital holding his eyeball, which must have been a nauseating experience. So I had all this violence surrounding me. I was not violent myself, so I just wanted to understand the causes of why people acted like that.
- 25 January 1978: Pips, Manchester, first concert billed as Joy Division
Jeremy Kerr: I used to go to Pips regularly. The Roxy room right at the back used to play David Bowie and Roxy Music, and then there was a commercial room which played all sorts of soul, and then later on there was a room downstairs called the Future or whatever – they played Kraftwerk, Trans-Europe Express – but it was good, all in one place. You could walk from one room with David Bowie and Roxy Music down into heavy soul music, and in between there was a stairway going up to the girls’ toilet – that was a good place to stand.
Kevin Cummins: I went to see them at Pips, when Ian got locked out. He went out for a cigarette, and they wouldn’t let him back in, they didn’t believe he was in the band.
Paul Morley: The change of name seemed to be good actually to rinse away Bernard’s moustache and Hooky’s leather cap and the slightly camp element that there was at the time. You probably would have thought there was a gayness about them because it did seem more Pips than anything else. A lot survived the Pips dressing-up business into punk, but they held onto it for quite a while. But I do remember Joy Division being something very early on, and not being Warsaw any more.
- 15 April 1978: Rafters, Manchester
Terry Mason: We got to a phase, and we were stuck with what we were doing. The whole thing about that night was, although it was supposed to be the Stiff/Chiswick Challenge and it was about new bands, it was still primarily being run by the music mafia over in Didsbury. Getting onstage that night was paramount. If we wouldn’t have got onstage, we would have called it a day, because it looked as if so many things were against us. We knew that we were owed a shot.
We were there early, and we just got given so much crap served up to us by people, and funnily enough the same people not long after that all became our friends. We were there, we wanted to go on, the night was going on and on and on, and we just thought we would never actually get onstage. We were getting wound up and we were getting drunk at the same time. Thinking about it nowadays, the stuff that we used to drink was awful. We were on Special Brew and blackcurrant. I’d rather drink diesel.
Kevin Cummins: At the Stiff/Chiswick Challenge, I had an argument with them. At the time it didn’t seem like they were part of what we would consider a Manchester scene. There wasn’t a scene as such, but they didn’t live in Hulme, they didn’t go to all the gigs like everybody else, and they also had an arrogance that was kind of misplaced at the time. Like a lot of bands, and a lot of young kids, they thought they were miles better than they were, and I thought, ‘I’ve got a few shots of them. I don’t need anything until something else happens.’
It was justified in a way, but they wanted to be outsiders as well. They didn’t want to be like the Drones, who would turn up every week, or Slaughter and the Dogs. They felt they had more to offer than that. Even though they didn’t necessarily at the time.
Paul Morley: That Rafters Stiff/Chiswick Challenge was really bonkers, because no group in their right mind would have wanted to have been on Stiff because it was kind of a novelty label. But everybody including Joy Division turned up to win, like some weird prototype X Factor, with some awful judging panel deciding who would be on this rather strange London label. There was a violence about that night, because for whatever reason, it looked like Joy Division might not get a chance to appear.
Terry Mason: The most annoying people on there were the Negatives, which is Paul Morley, Kevin Cummins, Richard Boon – it’s funny how the same names come up on the good side and the bad side on this – and it was those guys that had basically spoiled our Saturday night at the Electric Circus. The whole point of the Stiff/Chiswick Challenge was that at the end of the gig there was a possibility to travel the country. At the end of it the winner would get a single out.
They were basically just taking the piss. We were struggling to get gigs, we were struggling to get any sort of press, and these people were there basically laughing at us. We got mad at them, and I know Ian got mad at Paul Morley over it. People took the hint that we were less than pleased, and eventually we went on. I’m not sure if it was after two, but it was ridiculously late. By that point, because people had seen nine, ten bands already, none of them being particularly inspiring, the room was getting a lot thinner, the crowd wasn’t there.
Peter Hook: If you look at the other bands, they were softer than we were. We were heavier, musically and in personality, compared to Howard Devoto or Pete Shelley, who were very effete. That was what estranged us from them. We had so much aggro. Just because people didn’t like us. We were a working band, practising, and the Negatives come along, get pissed and think, ‘Oh, let’s play.’ And because they were so well in with everybody, on it went. You had to threaten your way to get anywhere.
Bernard Sumner: This was when I first saw the other side of Ian. He was a really lovely, really nice, polite, intelligent guy, but if he didn’t get what he wanted, he would explode into this kind of frenzied thing, because that’s the only way he could get what he wanted. I remember him kicking the door down of the Negatives’ dressing room and going to Paul Morley and Kevin Cummins, ‘You’re not fucking going on, you’re not fucking going on, we’ll kill you if you go on, and we’ll bottle you. We’re going on.’
We just threatened them so much that we ended up going on. Because Ian was so wound up by that stage, his performance was amazing. He ended up ripping the stage up. It was like sections of wood, and he just ended up ripping it up, throwing them out at the audience. It was an explosive performance. So Tony was there and Rob was there, and we just did the gig and thought, ‘It was a good gig that,’ and then went home and thought, ‘At least we got a chance to play.’
Bob Dickinson: I was working for the New Manchester Review, which was a really good place to meet musicians and bands and artists and all sorts of people. It was like a kind of railway station in a way, in that you saw everybody and got introduced to lots of people as well. I saw Joy Division for the first time in 1978, in April at the Stiff/Chiswick Challenge. The New Manchester Review used to promote Band on the Wall and Rafters, and I used to get paid something like £20 to DJ down there once a week.
There were lots of local ambitious new bands wanting to get signed, but it was ’78, so they were all pop bands or pub-rock bands, and I didn’t really like any of them. I can’t remember who any of the other bands were. I think about half past one in the morning Joy Division came on, and they played a pretty short set, about twenty minutes. You didn’t expect something like Joy Division to be on the bill and they were a bit of a shock to the system, and I enjoyed it because they were violent and hypnotic at the same time.
I didn’t know what to make of them when they came onstage because they were wearing biker gear. I think two of them were wearing leather trousers and I thought we were in for some kind of heavy metal because of the leather, but they had short hair, so it was confusing at first. And then they launched into this very uncompromising, crude music that was completely unlike anything else that had been on that night.
After the audience had left, I remember standing on the dance floor. I knew Rob Gretton because he was one of the other DJs at Rafters, and I just have this picture in my mind of him ranting at me, right in my face, really ecstatically – the floor was covered with broken glass and fag ends and the detritus of a gig – about how wonderful he thought they were and weren’t they the best band you’d ever seen in your life, and he was going to manage them, and he was going to take them to all sorts of places you wouldn’t believe. It was something I’ll never forget.
Terry Mason: Afterwards, Ian came over and collared Tony Wilson. I’m there chasing after Ian and thinking, ‘Oh God, don’t do anything too stupid,’ and he goes over and has a go at Wilson, and Wilson, being an educated man, decides he certainly doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of Ian, me and all the people who were sort of closing in on him. He becomes all nice and says, ‘Oh no, yeah, we’ll get you on So It Goes, next series, don’t worry.’ And after that things changed.
Peter Hook: It was like seeing an alien with tentacles and eighty eyes when I first met Tony Wilson. He was from another planet. It was quite odd because my mother used to take me into Tony’s dad’s tobacconist’s on Regent Road, next to Smith’s, the toyshop. She used to go and buy her cigarettes there every Saturday morning, and I used to go in with her and she’d go, ‘Hello, Mr Wilson,’ and he’d go, ‘Oh, hello, Mrs Hook, how are you?’ and they’d have a right proper chat, and I’d be sort of, you know, four or five years old or summat.
So I knew Tony’s dad before I knew Tony, and then years later I found out that his dad had the tobacconist’s on Regent Road, so that was a weird one, cos he might have been in there. That was weird, innit, both of us there, just five-year-olds. I just didn’t get Tony. He was showbiz. And he was a star, so you rebelled against it straight away, your thuggery – grrrrr – came out straight away. It’s funny that when he was pissed Ian called him a cunt for not putting us on, and we were like, ‘Oh, bloody hell, Ian, we’re never going to get on now.’
Mark Reeder: Rob came into the shop one time and said, ‘I saw the best band in the world last night – Joy Division,’ and I didn’t know who he was talking about, cos I thought they were called Warsaw. ‘Best band I’ve ever seen,’ he said. ‘I want to manage them.’ At that time he was managing a band called the Panik, and I think they’d just released their first single at the time, ‘It Won’t Sell’. It was right, too: we could hardly shift any of them. They stood there like lead.
Then, the same weekend, Tony Wilson came into the shop and said exactly the same thing. And it was then I realised they were talking about Warsaw. They’d changed the name because of Warsaw Pakt releasing that horrible record they recorded in twenty-four hours. I remember saying, ‘Everyone’s going to be identifying you with this group, are you not going to change your name?’
Anyway, I told Rob that Tony had said he wanted to manage them, and he was like, ‘No fucking chance! I’m gonna go give him a piece of my mind.’ And he went off to the telephone boxes in Piccadilly and phoned him up and swore at him, and came back and said, ‘Well, that’s done and dusted.’ He was really happy with himself. Apparently he’d told Tony Wilson to fuck off, to get his fingers off ‘his band’, and he was going to manage them. He was quite determined. After that, it was dead obvious what was going to happen.
Tony Wilson: I can remember seeing Warsaw at the Electric Circus one night and thinking, ‘What a bloody din.’ Then again, most of it was a bloody din. I remember obviously being taken by the lead singer, by the fact that he had something special about him, so it just goes to the back of your filing cabinet: ‘No, this isn’t the band I’ll put on television right now.’ Obviously, at the back of my mind I thought, ‘The lead singer’s really interesting, I’ll be aware of this,’ but that was it because it was caterwauling – I think is the correct phrase for how it sounded.
Whether I got a copy in the post of Little Drummer Boy or not, I don’t know, but I was aware they’ d changed their name to Joy Division, and sure enough, there was this Stiff/Chiswick test at Rafters. That night various things happened. Number one was walking down the stairs some girl said, ‘When’s So It Goes coming back, Mr Wilson?’ And this voice says, ‘He doesn’t fucking want it to come back, he wants it to go away so he can become a legend.’ And that was Gretton, it was my first meeting with Robert Leo Gretton.
Then I sat at the back of the place at the pool table, and a young boy in a long raincoat sat next to me and went, ‘You cunt, you’ve not put us on television, blah blah blah.’ It’s the only time that Ian ever did this to me. The fact that he spent the rest of his two or three years working with me behaving like a thoughtful sixth-form schoolboy and being lovely was just my fortune. That night I got the other Ian, which was the ‘you fucking bastard’.
At the time I didn’t answer him, but I know I remember thinking, ‘You’re next on the list, you fucking idiot. You don’t even know that I’ve already listened to this seven-inch single. It sounds wonderful. You’re the next.’ I could put one band a month on. At this point, there was no So It Goes and there was no What’s On. I would just have to put a band on occasionally on the local news programme, and they were next on my list.
I remember thinking the difference is that every other band that night at Rafters was onstage because they wanted to be onstage, they wanted to be rock stars, they wanted to be in the music business, but this lot were onstage because they had no fucking choice. They were driven by something inside them, and you could see it in their eyes. That night it was clear to me and my dear partner, the late Mr Robert Leo Gretton, that this was the most important band in Britain.
It’s my luck and fortune that I ended up working with them, and Rob as well. I mean, Rob’s story’s a different story, about going to them and wanting to manage them, but it was chalk and cheese. Chalk and cheese doesn’t describe this: chalk and cheese are the same colour, this was night and day. There was this searing light, the sun, and everything else was just dimness throughout the entire evening.