Factory handbill, June 1978 (Courtesy of Linder Sterling)

Richard Boon: Despite all these little places that you could hire and set up your own event, there was no focus. But all these hit-and-miss, drive-by-night punk-rock events in odd places stimulated something. Tony Wilson was very quick to pick up on that when Factory launched their night at the PSV Club, another club which had its off night. PSV was the Passenger Service Vehicle Club. It was for the bus drivers and clippies, set in by the crescents in the heart of Moss Side, which actually gave the venue an edge as well, so the environment really made it the focus.

Moss Side was edgy because it was on the borders of various competing cultures. Down the road was a heavily Asian culture – the famous Curry Mile; there was a large Afro-Caribbean element; and there was a lot of white people who had been forced into what possibly was a huge design mistake: the crescents in Hulme. It meant some people were going into an area they were unfamiliar with, felt cautious about. There was a lot of crime and drugs, so it was exactly the right place. But that’s what was needed: someone had to take that initiative and say, ‘Here’s a place that we can go, reliably, regularly, rather than be frustrated and waiting – “What’s going to happen?”’

 

Tony Wilson: Although I was putting bands on Granada Reports, my main music show was So It Goes. Basically, I’d annoyed my bosses. Iggy had done his version of ‘The Passenger’ at the Apollo, which we televised in October 1977, and there was a whole bit right in the middle when he’s sitting there with my cameraman, Mike Blakely, and he goes, ‘So I said to Camille, “Camille, I’m going to buy you a Rolls-Royce.” And she said, “Iggy, I hate fucking cars,” blah blah blah.’

So we cut the film, it’s wonderful, but ‘You got to get rid of the “fucking”.’ And I go berserk. ‘No, no, this is like telling Mozart.’ So basically my bosses at Granada had to have two weeks of this moron Wilson screaming that getting rid of the word ‘fucking’ from the middle of this Iggy Pop classic version of ‘The Passenger’ was like interfering with the Holy Bible or cutting a line out of Shakespeare – ‘You can’t do this.’ So they got all this bollocks from me, and I don’t blame them for saying, ‘That’s it, we don’t have to deal with this shit any more from Wilson.’

I got pulled upstairs and told, ‘Right, no more music shows, and by the way, if we see that guy with the horse’s tail coming out of his arse one more time, you’re fired’ – that was a reference to Iggy. So I accepted that as far as putting music on television, that was it, So It Goes was over. But for me the passion of my life, which in the sixties had been the obsession of every British child, come the seventies I’d become connected to it. Suddenly I was touching this wonderful world, and suddenly it was like, ‘Take your hands away now!’

I wanted to stay connected in some way or another, and around this very month when I was told this – January 1978 – one of my best friends, Alan Erasmus, got sacked as manager of a band, as did the drummer and the rhythm guitarist. This happened one particular day, 24 January 1978, after which we named all our companies. I rang Alan up and I said, ‘Alan, I’ll join you in managing this band, the Durutti Column.’ So I became a band manager in partnership with Erasmus, a partnership that lasted for thirteen, fourteen years.

You’re managing a band and you’re on the band’s first gig: ‘Well, we could play Rafters, but everyone plays Rafters. Why don’t we set up a new club?’ And Erasmus knew a club in Hulme. One of the secrets of life which I now tell people is: go and find a local bar or club that’s doing bad business on a Thursday or Friday night, and say, ‘Can we just borrow your club?’ The club owner doesn’t mind one little bit because he makes the real money off the bar. If you can make enough money by putting on bands and taking the door, so be it.

We thought we’d start a new club just for four weeks, four consecutive Friday nights at the Russell Club in Hulme. The story is entirely true: that Erasmus and I were walking round Manchester one day and Alan saw a sign saying ‘Factory Closing’ and said, ‘Let’s call the club the Factory, because we can have a factory opening instead of closing.’ So that is actually quite true, and the fact that me as a typical sort of sixties Oxbridge type didn’t for one second think about Warhol; it just seemed a very Mancunian northern industrial thing.

So it was Erasmus’s idea: start a club. Then this tiny young graphic design student who looked a bit like Bryan Ferry approached me at a bad Patti Smith concert – this was when Patti Smith had gone from being a New York poetess being a rock star to being a rock star claiming to be a New York poetess – and said, ‘If ever you want any graphics doing, Mr Wilson …’ He didn’t say, ‘My friend Malcolm Garrett does the stuff for Buzzcocks, and I’m jealous as fuck of him, and I need to get into this to rival Malcolm.’ He didn’t tell me that.

So I rang him up, and three days later he arrived in the Granada canteen, and typically Peter didn’t bring any of his own work at all, he brought this book of Jan Tschichold, and we spent half an hour poring over this book – wonderful – and Peter became the graphic designer. So that was how the Factory came about, and posters and the relationship, and that was the original three partners, which is Erasmus, Wilson and Saville.

 

Peter Saville: You couldn’t avoid him in Manchester. Tony had So It Goes, so he had one of the only television platforms. Tony loved what was going on and he was an amazing champion of it, and strangely a champion within the Establishment. There’s nothing more Establishment, particularly to young people, than television. There was this anchorperson for the current-affairs news programme, political television journalist, who had a late-night music programme that championed punk and the new wave.

That was wonderful, because television was giving exposure to something that you believed in and validating it. And also you knew it was being quite provocative and challenging as well. The Old Grey Whistle Test hadn’t quite got its head around this – it failed to get its head around even Roxy Music. We would see Tony at a gig at least once a week, with a cameraman from Granada in tow filming something, and it was a fabulous feeling of endorsement.

Everybody knew Tony, and we often feel that we know people on television; actually, we don’t know them at all, but we think we do because they’re familiar, and Tony was somebody that we felt we knew. I think everybody had mixed feelings, but they were grateful that he was there and interested and cared. I met him because Richard Boon said, ‘Go see him.’ My kind, closest friend at college,

Malcolm Garrett, had managed to actually start working with the Buzzcocks, which I was incredibly envious of. Malcolm deserved it, and I actually didn’t, but I was still terribly envious and wanted to be involved in what was going on as well. So I would harass Richard Boon every week when I saw him, hoping that perhaps he’d take on another band and that it would be too much for Malcolm to cope with, or whatever. I did my weekly harassing of Richard: ‘Have you got anything you would like doing?’ And Richard said, ‘Go and see Tony Wilson, I’ve heard he’s trying to get a club night organised. Perhaps he’ll need something.’

A club night was necessary because all of the amazing venues in Manchester – there’d been so many of them through ’76, ’77 and ’78 – had been systematically closed down by the authorities for one reason or another, because punk was destabilising and a concern to the greater Establishment, a little bit the way rave culture was in the early nineties. People were worried. And so venues were closed, licences denied and neighbours upset about noise or whatever, and suddenly by early ’78 there was almost nowhere for bands to play in Manchester.

In his champion-of-the-young-people role, Tony took it upon himself to organise a venue. I went to see him, and I was confident enough to just go and say, ‘Can I do something?’ We had a meeting in the canteen of Granada Television, and I hadn’t done anything worth showing. I’d been very happy in my first couple of years at art college, air-brushing glamour and doing pretend Roxy Music covers, and then I’d hit this non-period in ’76, where suddenly all of that didn’t seem to matter any more. I began to find where I wanted to go, courtesy of Malcolm Garrett’s influence.

I went to see Tony with a couple of books under my arm, and I showed Tony the manifesto by Jan Tschichold called Die Neue Typographie. I said, ‘I want to do something like this. Do you need anything?’ Tony looked at it. It’s not really Tony’s sphere, but it kind of looked right, so he said, ‘Yes, why don’t you do a poster?’

So it came to pass that I did a poster. He’d already done one, which he showed me: he’d done the two cowboys from the situationist canon, which I hated. I think it was on Alan’s wall, and Tony proudly showed it to me and said, ‘Well, I’ve done this just for fun,’ and it was the two cowboys and their conversation in French about reification. I didn’t understand it at all. It was twenty years until I understood it, and then I understood it so well that I quoted it in the front of my book, but I didn’t get it then.

 

Tony Wilson: I remember going to Peter’s flat in Hale, and he had these pieces of black and pieces of yellow squares and lines and was playing with them, actually constructing them on the floor. It wasn’t very punk, but my obsession is working with people who are cleverer than I am. If you’re working with people who are cleverer than you, why tell them what to do? ‘You’re a graphic designer, you’re a clever kid, do what you want to do.’ Musicians, the same; everyone, do what you want to do because either you can do it or you can’t.

 

Peter Saville: I don’t even know if Tony needs a poster, but he says, ‘Do something.’ He embraces the desire for someone to be involved, he sees that. It’s just a fledgling thing, nothing’s even happened yet, and it’s only going to be a Friday night every couple of weeks at the Russell Club, but someone comes along and says, ‘I want to help.’ So he says, ‘Fine.’ So it comes to pass that I do a poster. At some point I say, ‘What should we say?’ And he says, ‘These are the dates, this is who’s playing.’

So I go away and do something that I want to do. I was both delighted and disappointed by the fact that it was going to be called the Factory. It immediately gave me a Warhol feeling, but this was not a good kind of sixties-quoting moment. Actually, we’re sort of in the process of getting away from all of that: this is a point at which you’re trying to put some distance between yourself and the immediate past. I was more interested in the twenties than in the sixties.

The coolly industrial understanding of Factory, that’s the real understanding of Factory. There’s two clear aesthetic channels running through postmodernism. One is the default remnant of sixties modernism, and that’s high tech. The exuberant, modern, futuristic aesthetic of the sixties does drop out as the plastic furniture breaks and the waterbed leaks, but an undeniable truth of contemporary design was there in the commercial and the industrial, so high tech is the contemporary aesthetic that survives the sixties.

In postmodernism you see that radically juxtaposed against a contemporary pseudo-classicism. Classicism is part of that grand tour rediscovery. Actually, people quite like some columns and some pediments, and postmodern architecture sees a rather free form playing with those elements, moved away from their status as icons of privilege. They’re plastic or they’re pink, or in the case of the AT&T building, they’re on top of a six-hundred-foot skyscraper. It’s a bit like the common people playing with the debris post-revolution.

Postmodernism is aesthetically defined by these two things, the interplay between high tech and neoclassicism. And Factory played perfectly into the high-tech aesthetic for me. There was a sign on a workshop door at the art college which I coveted for months. It was in the 3D department, on one of the workshop doors, and it was the ‘Use Hearing Protection’ head, and as soon as Tony said, ‘I’m going to call this night the Factory,’ I thought, ‘I’m going to borrow that sign.’

The very evening I saw Tony I had to remove that sign from the workshop door, and that became the industrial symbol of sound that I wanted to quote in the context of Factory: a factory of sound. My notions of high-tech information were answered by quoting Die Neue Typographie from 1919, which is Jan Tschichold’s manifesto of the new typography of the machine age, and so the first Factory poster is this funny hybrid of an industrial warning sign from the seventies composed together with a piece of rather strict, idealistic, modernist typography.

The Factory, 30 x 40˝ poster, 1978 (Design by Peter Saville)

By virtue of being a calendar of things coming, that first Factory poster covers four nights across a couple of months. There was no specific thing for it to be about, other than a notion of a place that was called the Factory. I knew fully that when these posters were put up around Manchester, 99.9 per cent of the people who saw them would fail to register them, but they weren’t intended for the 99.9 per cent, they were intended for the 0.1 per cent who would be interested in going, and I hoped that that 0.1 per cent would notice a visual statement of difference.

  • 9 June 1978: the Factory I, PSV Club, Hulme, Manchester

Richard Kirk: Cabaret Voltaire were working in Sheffield. We sent some of our recordings to New Hormones. People in Manchester heard what we’ d done, and Tony Wilson got to hear, and then we were invited to play at the Factory. I can’t remember whether we played the opening night or the second night, but whenever we played, I think we played alongside Joy Division. They vaguely reminded me of the Doors, but if the Doors had been in Manchester in the seventies rather than in Los Angeles in the sixties.

Ian Curtis was a fan of writers like William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard, and that’s where we bonded. We were interested in the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and Kraftwerk, so that’s another thing where we had a lot in common. We were all working class, from similar sorts of backgrounds. Their music was very northern, a little bit like Cabaret Voltaire, a similar sort of take on life or the world – dystopian, grim, industrial.

 

Malcolm Whitehead: I’d met Rob Gretton in 1976, that great summer, and we really clicked. Rob had been to a kibbutz and come back, and I suppose he was trying to get himself together, so you had these two grammar-school boys trying to find out what to do with their lives. Anyway, we got on really well, and then he left early because he was going to Crete with Lesley, so post-’76 we lost a bit of touch, and I think we met up at the Moss Side Carnival the next year. He told me then he was managing a band.

I thought, ‘Oh right.’ He said, ‘You’re into wanting to do films,’ because we used to talk a lot about what we wanted to do in the future. He suggested I film this band he was managing, the Panik, at the Electric Circus. They were absolutely awful. I was shooting, but it was so dark I gave up after a reel. I was working on that for about a month, and he rang me up and said, ‘No, I’m not managing them any more, forget about it now.’ He was managing this other group. I think they’d just changed their name to Joy Division, so he said, ‘Come down and see them, see what you think.’

So I went into the Russell, and Joy Division were playing. They came on – there was nobody there because they were on very early – and they were just absolutely stunning. I can remember it, but not in my head, in my stomach, and it was that power, it was like, ‘This is what I’ve always wanted from a band.’ I was drained after seeing them.

I can remember to this day what I said to Rob. I said, ‘I thought I was going to have to be like with the Panik. I thought I was going to have to come tonight and say to you, “Oh, they’re very nice, Rob, we will do something with them.”’ But I was passionate about them: ‘We’ve got to do something with these.’ I didn’t think they’d sell any records, didn’t even think in those terms, but I thought they were going to be massive culturally. They’d just got it, just overwhelming.

 

Iain Gray: The shock of Ian was just immense. It was the first gig they ever did at the Factory, the Russell Club. It was beyond what the Sex Pistols did. Ian comes out, I can’t remember what they opened with, but it was just unbelievable. Ian’s just there and he starts that dance which I’d seen the very seeds of in a shed in Withington. It was otherworldly, and I was thinking, ‘This is Ian who buys flowers for his wife, chocolates, he’s the guy from The Waltons, and he’s up onstage and it’s totally inspirational and hypnotic.’

He was like a messiah, almost. I’m sold to it, I bought it totally. The weird thing about it was that I knew Ian. Usually it devalues star quality if you know them, but I saw him and I was just absolutely astounded. I felt so in awe of someone I knew, and I find that odd to this day. It was totally British, it was totally him, it wasn’t an act and it was frightening.

 

Tony Wilson: They’d already become quite powerful. By May, June ’78 they no longer had the caterwauling sound and the interesting lead singer. It had already become something rock-like, something honed like a diamond, and it was just getting more and more that way. They were stunning. Although my memory is of Margi Clarke being in this tiny dressing room and amusing Joy Division with stories, and suddenly going, ‘Oh, I need to take a piss, I need to go to the toilet,’ and the guys going, ‘Okay, fine,’ and Margaret hitching her skirt up and sitting in the sink, while two young Salford boys and two Macclesfield boys looked completely ashen. It was like they’d never seen behaviour like this before, never met anyone like Margi before.

Stephen Morris: When Tony started doing the Factory nights, there was this kind of void: there was the band, then there was nothing, and then there were some people lurking there. It didn’t bother Ian that there was nobody there, that was just what happened, he’d go for it, and he did go for it in an empty room. And by the second time this void was getting narrower and narrower, so that eventually there was even the odd person dancing. Yeah, they’d sort of come to the front and, wahey, we’ve got an audience now.

  • 28 July 1978: the Factory I, Manchester
  • 29 August 1978: Band on the Wall, Manchester

Paul Morley, NME, 9 September 1978

Their music is mercilessly attacking, it rotates, persists, repeats, always well balanced … This could be Joy Division’s peak.

  • 4 September 1978: Band on the Wall, Manchester
  • 9 September 1978: Eric’s, Liverpool
  • 10 September 1978: Royal Standard, Bradford
  • 22 September 1978: Coach House, Huddersfield

Bernard Sumner: By this time we’d play everywhere and anywhere. I had some dodgy agent, a small guy in a back office in the middle of Manchester. He’d put us on in places like Huddersfield, and we’d get £5 for playing. I remember paying to play at one place, a working men’s club in Huddersfield, and somewhere in Leeds, all over in West Yorkshire, where no one else would play. It was a fantastic escape for us really.

In fact, Steve and Hooky got pulled in for questioning as Yorkshire Ripper suspects because we spent so much time driving over the Pennines – we played gigs in those areas where the Ripper was killing people. Steve had his Cortina, and they got his number and they got Hooky’s van. The police came round to the house and took him in for questioning. ‘Well, he’s got a beard, hasn’t he? Why did he bleach his hair all of a sudden, change his appearance? He’s got a hammer in the back of the car as well.’ Of course, we found that incredibly humorous when they got pulled in.

Going back to our little agent and us playing in West Yorkshire, we’d play that place like three times, and you’d go there once and it’d be five people, by the third time it was packed out, so it must have been word of mouth. I think the thing was, we weren’t like other bands. By the time we’d stopped aping punk and discovered our own sound, we sounded unique and we looked unique. It was a gradual, slow-build process.

 

Malcolm Whitehead: Every time they were playing locally I went to see them, and it wasn’t very long before it was absolutely packed. I bet it was weeks, because things seemed to be so compacted into a short space of time then.

They had this magical thing. I’ve never seen it in any other band – you might get three members working and one not – but everything came together. It was like one of those wonderful accidents, because when you learn about how they got together, it was slightly random, and yet they were born to play with each other. They happened to be artistically right for each other. They’re all different personalities, and yet they worked superbly together.

It was Ian connecting in that way: the way he laid himself bare. The massive courage of the man, that’s what got to me. To be honest, I didn’t really know what they were singing about because it was so loud. But I knew what he was singing about without hearing the lyrics. I don’t know whether it was just a natural thing or whether he had to force himself to do it. I know he had to knock down a few Pils before he went onstage. I don’t think that was just a bit of nervousness about being before an audience, I think it was, ‘Ooh, I’ve got to do this and I’ve got to tell the truth, so I’ll have to get a little bit pissed if I’m going to do this.’ All the times I ever saw him I never thought, ‘He’s just going through the motions.’ I think each performance that he gave that I saw was the real deal, the raw truth.

 

Bernard Sumner: Part of the time when Joy Division was forming, Ian worked in a rehabilitation centre for people with physical and mental disabilities trying to find work again. He was very much affected by those people. ‘She’s Lost Control’ was about a girl who used to come into the centre and try to find work. She had epilepsy and lost more and more time through it, and then one day she just didn’t come in any more. He assumed that she’d found a job, but found out later that she’d had a fit and died.

My influence was from my grandparents and from the war. Ian’s influence seemed to be madness and insanity. He was interested in the sick part of life. He said that his sister, or his aunt or somebody, had worked in a mental home, and she used to tell him things about the people in the home – people with twenty nipples or two heads – and that left a big impression on him. He had moments of intensity, but he was fun. Primarily he was a fun guy, a good laugh. He wasn’t a straight person.

Let me start with his moments of intensity, when he got frustrated. I remember him coming down from a hotel once, and he’d phoned Debbie and the phone call cost £10, and he didn’t realise that hotels charge so much for calls. So he asked Rob to contribute towards it because he didn’t have any money, and Rob was like, ‘Fuck off, pay for it yourself,’ and Ian going apeshit with Rob over that, just completely exploding in frustration at Rob.

I remember another time in the rehearsal room him getting so frustrated at Rob he just picked up a wastepaper basket, put it on his head and starting marching up and down the thing in a frenzy, and of course we found that extremely funny. He went fucking bananas, completely crazy. He went from being this nice, polite, pleasant, funny person to being completely insane. Ian was strongwilled when he was riled; he had an explosive personality.

But most of the time he was cool. He really was. His performance, I guess, was a manifestation of this kind of frenzy that he went into. He was Ian, and then suddenly [snaps fingers] he’d hit this threshold and become this manic person whose head was in another world. He was like that onstage, but he was like that if you had an argument with him as well. He was a very charismatic frontman because people never knew what was going to happen with him next – we didn’t – and it just worked. He seemed to get carried away by the music.

A lot of people thought he was off his head on drugs, and he wasn’t, never, ever, ever. Because he looked like he was on drugs, but the music seemed to put him in a trance and he just started dancing away and he’d go to another world. He was lost in the music, completely. You never knew what was going to happen next, whether he was going to start pulling the stage apart or smashing the drum kit up. It was just a very exciting performance to watch.

Bob Greaves: … called Joy Division. They were called Warsaw once, but Joy Division, I think, has a nicer ring to it, and we hope that we’re launching them on a real joyride, as we have before with many others, haven’t we, Tony, yes?

Tony Wilson: Seeing as how this is the programme which previously brought you first television appearances from everything from the Beatles to the Buzzcocks, we do like to keep our hand in and keep you informed of the most interesting new sounds in the north-west. This, Joy Division, is the most interesting new sound we’ve come across in the last six months. They’re a Manchester band, with the exception of the guitarist, who comes from Salford – very important difference. They’re called Joy Division, and this number is ‘Shadowplay’.

Peter Hook: I was terrified. Rob took us out and bought us a new shirt each: ‘Got to keep them on the lead.’ So we had a new shirt for ‘Shadowplay’. I watched it back on Granada, and I thought, ‘Fucking hell, we’re good.’ There were very few occasions when I’ve thought, ‘Oh, that was good.’

 

Bernard Sumner: It was bizarre, because we weren’t allowed to touch our own equipment because of the studio regulations, the unions and all that. It was like go and plug my amplifier in, and: ‘Don’t touch that, you’ll have them all off the set if you touch that, we’ll shut it down.’ I said, ‘It’s just a plug, I just want to plug my amp in.’ – ‘Don’t touch it, sunshine.’

I remember seeing it and being pretty pleased with it; they’d cut a bit of footage in of cars going through a city.

 

Tony Wilson: I asked one of the directors to direct the afternoon session if he would, and it was the wonderful, lovely David Liddiment, who went on to be head of ITV. I was in the box, and David said, ‘I want to drop something behind them, can you go and get me some backing, Tony, please?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine.’ So I ran upstairs to the first-floor World in Action editing suites, where one of my friends was the editor. ‘Can I borrow some stuff?’ And they have these bins with little wire things. They’d been neg-cutting some documentary about the CIA in Langley, just outside Washington, and they said, ‘Those are being thrown away, you can have them, Tony.’ So we just glued together this series of black-and-white negative travelling shots of Langley. I ran down to telecine, and then David rolled it in the background and overlaid it, so it’s nice suburban shots and there’s no real meaning whatsoever. I think far more meaning is in the fact that Bernard looks so young and beautiful in it.

You see some very large beltway bungalows. It was totally chance; it could have been anything in the bin of that World in Action cutting room. It was by chance a suburban travelogue, it’s that ‘To the centre of the city where all roads meet, waiting for you’ lyric, with the fact that Ian and Steve come from Macclesfield. Manchester was the big city just down the road, and they would go backwards and forwards, so it’s that understanding of the northern city.

 

C. P. Lee: Joy Division and their ilk are among the first vanguard of groups who could actually use proper motorways, and there is a feeling of motion within Joy Division, the idea that there’s a Mancunian Way which goes east–west. It doesn’t actually go anywhere, but it’s there and it’s in the sky. We’re very used to American groups talking about the freeway. Joy Division don’t actually sing about that, but I think there’s an undercurrent, there’s a feeling of motion and of movement and use of roads. In the seventies you could actually criss-cross Great Britain, so there is the kind of free spirit which is associated with driving.

  • 12 October 1978: Kelly’s, Manchester

Bob Dickinson: Kelly’s was a little basement nightclub in a tiny little street just off Hanover Street. It’s not there now. It was a Rock Against Racism promotion and Phil Jones promoted it, which is how I knew about it, because he used to come round to my flat. There was hardly anybody there; it was the closest I’d ever stood to Joy Division, so I could look at them really closely. I don’t think it was a terribly good gig. Joy Division weren’t great every time; probably they were underperforming because there weren’t that many people there.

Something that was different from the first time I saw them was that they had changed the way they dressed. They stopped wearing leather jackets and boots and so on, and they started wearing suits and ties and dark shirts, dark suits, and they started looking like ‘Here are the young men.’ They looked German, but they looked well-dressed and sober. They always looked serious, but the suits were part of this important image change that they went through that created the character of Joy Division.

I don’t think they were Nazis, I think they were deeply aware of Nazism and the things that Nazism had done, and they were interested in Auschwitz, Warsaw, the ghettos, the way that the Nazis oppressed and killed the Jews. I think their music was very much influenced by this sense that they were haunted, that we’re all haunted by the ghosts of Nazism and by what it did to Europe. The fact that they didn’t come from formerly occupied Europe is probably what makes it even more powerful.

They were talking about it in dark, depressing Manchester. They were throwing up these echoes and these spectres of late Second World War Europe and the deaths of millions, and it’s something that people still don’t want to think about, so I never thought they were Nazis. When I bought Ideal for Living and looked at the artwork, that drummer boy on the front and Barney’s haircut, I thought, ‘That’s just Barney cutting his hair deliberately to look like that and carry the guilt.’ That’s what I thought: ‘Carry the guilt and not be ashamed.’

 

Bernard Sumner: We knew that we weren’t Nazis, and that was good enough for us. At the same time, we were doing gigs for Rock Against Racism. We didn’t feel we should defend ourselves, because we knew we weren’t Nazis – quite the opposite. We didn’t feel that we had to go out to the press, saying, ‘Wait a minute, that first sleeve is actually anti-Nazi.’ We thought that was a bit crass. Our attitude was, if anyone wants to know if we’re Nazis, ask us, and we’ll tell you the truth. But nobody asked us. We were also being naive, to be fair.

  • 20 October 1978: the Factory I, Manchester

Liz Naylor: In ’77 I’d have been fourteen, fifteen, and I didn’t know what to do and I felt really frustrated. I was really into music, and I also loved Captain Beefheart and things like that, so punk wasn’t too much of a leap for me to make. I’d been to see Beefheart at the Free Trade Hall in maybe ’74, I’d seen Lou Reed in some kind of particularly grim Free Trade Hall moment, so punk was absolutely natural for me to latch onto.

I think about late ’77, maybe early ’78, the thing I’d do was go and stand in the Virgin record shops, which was where other punks were standing, and I didn’t really do anything but stand in the shop. I thought something would happen to me and it would be a way to access it – of course nothing ever did happen to me there, but that’s how I sniffed the punk atmosphere. All very frustrating.

I was absolutely the only punk where I lived in Hyde. I used to get chased by a gang of boys. They used to call me Punky and chased me down the road and terrorised me. I wasn’t very hard; I was quite frightened by them. Hyde had one record shop, and it didn’t really sell punk records, but it was there I saw a piece of A4 paper with a handwritten thing saying the Fall were playing at Droylsden Town Hall. Droylsden was a really horrible suburb between Hyde and Ashton and Manchester, and for some reason I’d heard of the Fall by then.

That was June 1978, and that was the first punk-rock gig I ever went to. It was fantastic. For somebody who was into Beefheart, the Fall totally made sense to me, and being there was just this amazing moment. I didn’t think I’d be let in, but because it was a town hall gig, it was fine. They were supported by a band called the Distractions, and their bass player came up and talked to me, so I sort of felt like I was in the music industry. I knew that everything that I’d been standing around Virgin Records waiting to happen – that access to the punk atmosphere – happened in a tiny little way that night.

That summer of ’78 I saw my first punk gig, shagged my first girl and cut my hair off, and it was just a great moment of ‘I can’t go back.’ I really understood that. And then I started to hang out in places in Manchester, pubs and clubs that would let me in, which was remarkable because I looked about thirteen. It just shows you the kind of class of joint I was hanging out in that would let me in.

And I never had any money. I did a bit of babysitting, rather alarmingly, but I didn’t really have any money, so I didn’t buy a lot of records. All my trips to record shops were just to look at them and imagine what it would be like to buy them or imagine what they sounded like. That took me into Salford, into Robinson’s Records, and the real edges of Manchester that were quite decayed.

On the Eighth Day, in All Saints, was a bona fide hippie shop that had a little café in it, and I ate things that I’d never eaten before because I’d just come from a common family that ate meat pies. I ate brown rice and sesame seeds and Mu tea. I was really intoxicated by the smell, which I suspect would have been patchouli oil, but it really excited me. They had second-hand records upstairs, and I bought my copy of Trout Mask Replica there. There were all these fusty records that I could touch and smell.

I bought a hessian bag, and I used to read Mole Express, which was a very important underground paper at that point. I didn’t understand any of it, but it didn’t matter: you know that you’re stuck in the wrong world, and it’s like trying to find a portal to the world that you should be in, and that was my portal to this possible world. On the Eighth Day was next to a radical bookshop called Grass Roots, where I used to stand and read books and not buy anything. I loved being in those places.

Summer 1978 is this big moment of crisis for me – or liberation. I go back to school, and that September it all collapses, everything blows up, and I get expelled very early on that term. I’m asked to leave in no uncertain terms. And then I have this period when I was drifting around and I was seeing education welfare officers and social services were kicking in. That’s when I saw Joy Division at the Factory.

I used to run away from home and go to the Factory and stay out all night, because there was a flat opposite the Factory on Bonsall Street, in Hulme, where anybody could just doss down. I used to go to soundchecks at the Factory and just stay in, and I also discovered that there’s a side bar, where I used to steal beer and open it with my teeth. The Factory was the place I could get in: when I saw Joy Division it wasn’t a problem to just smuggle myself in and stay there.

  • 15 November 1978: Brunel University, Rezillos tour, Joy Division supporting the Undertones and the Rezillos

Martin, joydiv.org: The gig was held in what was known as the Kingdom Room. I had seen numerous bands play there, it was always very dark inside and had low ceilings which added to the atmosphere. The venue was full that night, about 400+ I’d say, I was at the very front crushed up against the stage. Joy Division took the stage to a few muffled cheers and a lot of ‘who the fuck are they?’ Without any introduction they went straight into the set.

Being unfamiliar with their music I can only be sure of remembering two numbers – Walked In Line and Digital, this was down to the repetition of the chorus. The sound was harsh and disjointed and without any apparent melody, but very loud and furious. I was unsure if I liked the sound but it didn’t matter, as I was engrossed in Mr Curtis who was no more than eight feet away from me and going like a fucking train! Ian kept locking onto people in the audience with piercing stares, including me, for a good ten seconds he made me feel quite uncomfortable.

Unfortunately the set was cut very short; there can’t have been any more than four or five numbers. The reason being that a part of the audience was still into the spitting thing and took a big dislike to Ian. They covered the poor man from head to foot and shouted ‘Rubbish!!’, ‘Off Off Off!!’ At the end of Digital, Ian had clearly had enough and said quite politely to the audience ‘I see you are not educated down south’ and promptly walked off. He was quickly followed by Sumner and Hook, Steve Morris realised it was over and scrambled from his drums, unfortunately he had to walk past the front of them to exit the stage and he tripped on a speaker cable, the crowed jeered and heckled him, he picked himself up, hurled some obscenities and walked off.

Mick Middles, Sounds, 18 November 1978

On the record label it says ‘songs by Joy Division’. Do you write collectively? Who comes up with the ideas?

Ian: ‘It varies a lot, musically anyway.’

Bernard: ‘We usually start with a drum riff and then add bass and guitar on top of that. Ian supplies the lyrics.’

Ian: ‘Yeah, I’ve got a little book full of lyrics and I just fit something in. I have a lot of lyrics in reserve so I’ll use them when the right tune comes along. The lines are usually made up of all sorts of odd bits. “Leaders Of Men” for example, some of the lines are two or three years old.’

What are the lyrics about?

Ian: ‘I don’t write about anything in particular, I write very subconsciously.’

  • 20 November 1978: Check Inn Club, Altrincham

Mike Nicholls, Record Mirror, 25 November 1978

Fronting the band is the pallid, hyperactive Ian Curtis, whose weird, wired mechanic dance routines are reminiscent of Lou Reed circa ’74.

Nick Tester, Sounds, 13 January 1979

Joy Division try to be a grim group, but I just grinned. They stutter onstage wearing sulky, long looks. The vocalist, Ian Curtis, seems intensely irritated but he doesn’t say anything between the songs other than to remark the band are going to tune up.

Terry Mason: We’d become this reasonable-sized fish in the pool that’s the north-west and a little bit of Yorkshire, but this was like Jesus going into Jerusalem on a donkey. This was our first London gig, and it was at a gig that we’ d heard of. We’ d read the papers, and you always used to see the gigs in London were at the Rainbow, at the Nashville Rooms or at the Hope and Anchor. We got there: it was just after Christmas, it was a Sunday night. Not that many people turned up, and it was such a disappointment for Ian, and I think that maybe triggered what happened.

 

Bernard Sumner: Ian had this explosive personality: Mr Polite, Mr Nice, and suddenly, before anyone realised, about the third song in, you’d notice he’d gone a bit weird, started pulling the stage apart, ripping up the floorboards and throwing them at the audience. Then, by the end of the set, he would be completely and utterly manic. Then you’d come offstage, and he’d be covered in blood, going, ‘Fucking hell, what happened then?’ But no one would talk about it, because that was our way. We didn’t question it. We didn’t think he knew why he got himself worked up that way.

One day we were doing a concert at the Hope and Anchor in London. I don’t know if it was our first concert in London. I was incredibly ill. I had tonsillitis or flu, I didn’t really want to go. Steve turned up in his Cortina, and Rob was like, ‘Come on, get out of bed. Come on, you’re going.’ I got in the car, and I remember Ian being in a weird mood – it was unusual for him, a little bit childish and brattish, which wasn’t him – on the way down, and a little bit negative, not quite himself. This was in the morning.

We drove down and did the concert, and only about three people turned up, and it was horribly hot and sweaty, in a tiny little room. The sound was crap, and every time Steve hit his drums the room started spinning for me. We actually had something to eat after the gig: we went for a Greek meal. Ian was really negative and bratty and not nice, and I remember thinking it was unusual. I took a sleeping bag down with me and we got in the car to go back.

We started driving up. By then it was about two in the morning, driving back up the M1, and we got near Luton. Ian was in the front, Steve was there, and I think me and Rob were in the car; I think Hooky was in the van. I had the sleeping bag over me, and Ian was moaning about the gig and moaning about the sound, and he said, ‘Hey, give me that sleeping bag,’ which wasn’t like him, because he wasn’t a selfish person at all. He turned round, grabbed the sleeping bag off me. I said, ‘Stop pissing about, give it me back,’ and I pulled it, so he pulled it back. I pulled it back and then held onto it, so he just wrenched it out of my hands but put it over his head this time and wrapped himself in a ball, and then just started making this weird growling sound, just growling like a dog, and I’m thinking, ‘What’s going on?’ And next thing a hand comes out the sleeping bag, lashes out at Steve, comes out, punching the windscreen, and then he just starts punching, and that punching turned into a fully-fledged grand mal fit in the car while Steve was driving.

So I was like, ‘Pull over, pull over, he’s having a fit, he’s freaking out, pull over.’ So Steve pulled over to the hard shoulder, and me and Rob dragged him for his own protection out the car and held him down flat on the hard shoulder in the middle of the night, and we just pinned his limbs down while he basically had a fit. We knew he’d had a fit, and we took him to the hospital in Luton, and they basically said, ‘Go and see your doctor when you get home.’

We just thought, ‘One-off, never happened before, it’s a one-off.’ After that he got diagnosed with epilepsy, and they just started getting more and more frequent, and then it never stopped. It was difficult for us to comprehend because we never suspected it was going to happen. It was quite difficult to accept that after that point, Ian’s different.

 

Stephen Morris: It affected Ian in a really bad way because they put him on heavy tranquillisers, and the doctor told him the only way he could minimise the risk was by leading a really normal, regular life, which by that time wasn’t something he wanted to do. He liked to jump around onstage, and he liked to get pissed. The first time I saw that side of him was one night we were trying to get into the Electric Circus, and he just ran off, and the next time I saw him he had his tongue down this girl’s throat. He used to go a bit wild. He didn’t like being told he couldn’t do that any more: it was one of the reasons he got into the band in the first place.

 

Peter Hook: I was in the van in front with the gear, and they were behind in the Cortina, and the Cortina just disappeared and we stopped, but we didn’t have enough petrol to go and look for them. We had no money – we’ d each put in to go to that gig and we were running out of money – and so I couldn’t go back. I thought, if they broke down, Steve was in the AA, so I knew he’ d be all right. I knew they’d make it home eventually. It was only when I drove home and dropped the roadies Twinny and Terry off and did the gear and everything that I heard that Ian was ill.

 

Terry Mason: We didn’t know what to do. We’d certainly never come across people who’d had fits before. We didn’t know what to say to him. What do you say to your mate who’s just thrown a massive fit in the back of the car and who’s just been diagnosed epileptic? Plus, we’re men, men don’t talk, and we certainly didn’t talk to each other. We were blokes: ‘Oh, go and see the doctor, I’m sure he’ll give you some tablets for it,’ and Ian duly went off to see the doctor and had the tests, and from then he had more tests and bigger and bigger prescriptions.

 

Deborah Curtis: I think the trouble started when my pregnancy began to show: he had that first fit. It sounds awful, but I think he liked to have the attention. I think one of the things he liked about me was that I did stand behind him, a hundred per cent, whatever he did. I supported him so much. When I got pregnant, everybody made a fuss of me, and I think he was a bit jealous.

I think he had a row at the gig at the Hope and Anchor, but nobody has said it was a row. My mum remembers me telling her that they were talking about Ian leaving the band, so it must have been a pretty big event. But he took it all so seriously. I don’t think he believed that the other lads took it as seriously as he did. It was all he wanted. I think he felt that other people weren’t giving as much. They were, but they weren’t making so much noise about it.