“There was a man there in a rubber suit. You don’t see many rubber suits.” – Terry Mason
Peter Hook, who was born on February 13, 1956 and who will henceforth be known as Hooky, became friendly with Bernard Dickin (aka Sumner/Albrecht), who was born on January 4, 1956 and who will hence-forth be known as Barney, at Salford Grammar School. Although not in the same stream together, they became acquainted with one another between classes and also befriended a third Salford Grammar School boy, Terry Mason.
All three boys had spent their childhoods in the gloom of industrial Salford. Hooky, despite a brief and unlikely spell in the Caribbean, lived in a two-up two-down in Ordsall, close to Manchester docks, while Barney grew up in Lower Broughton, close to the River Irwell. Both would later admit that memories of happy childhoods spent in dreary Salford would significantly flavour the music of Joy Division.
It seems that both Hooky and Barney were able to negotiate their schooldays and surroundings without falling prey to bullies and intimidation. “We weren’t wusses,” says Hooky. “Far from it. But we were both clever enough to befriend the right people and stay out of the real trouble. We weren’t idiots, frankly and there were quite a few of them about. I think myself and Barney were just two kids on the same level.”
After leaving school, Barney, Hooky and Terry remained friends. At 16 they all bought Lambretta scooters which provided a shared interest to enforce their bonding. They managed to pay for these by doing various jobs, Hooky and Terry cleaning offices from 5.30 until 7.30 in the evening and Barney working in a local supermarket. Together they would also investigate latter-day glam and garage bands that flourished in the mid-Seventies. One of their haunts was The Roxy Room at Pip’s disco, situated beneath The Corn Exchange behind Manchester Cathedral. Terry was able to get the trio in free because his dad knew the bouncer on the door.
One of few places in Manchester where a flamboyant dress sense was positively encouraged, Pip’s became an early meeting place for many of those who would form the Manchester punk scene.
In the summer of 1976, Terry convinced Barney and Hooky to go along with him to the Sex Pistols gigs at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall. Barney brought along his regular girlfriend since schooldays, Sue Barlow, whom he later married. Although some believe that the importance of the Lesser Free Trade Hall Pistols gigs have been somewhat overstated, they were almost certainly a trigger for the musical ambitions of many in attendance.
Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto famously shelled out the necessary £32 to hire the hall on Friday June 4, 1976, and, to more poignant effect, on Tuesday July 20, where they would make their debut appearance as Buzzcocks. The first gig, missed by Ian Curtis and wife Debbie, saw Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, clad in black rubber, accosting pedestrians on Peter Street like some downbeat and desperate spiritual street hawker. Even when he succeeded, many of the wary Pistols gig goers were immediately swamped by the music of the support band, a progressive rock act called Solstice.
Sex Pistol Glen Matlock: “There were two gigs… yes, I remember one of the Free Trade Hall nights was the very first time we played ‘Anarchy In The UK’ on stage. That was the night that Tony Wilson saw us and immediately booked us for his television show, So It Goes. We didn’t know it at the time but how amazing it was, to have had all those people at that show. I thought Buzzcocks were wonderful. Much better than The Clash, who were just like a bad version of ourselves. Buzzcocks had a great attitude. They were quite cute, in a way. Very provincial but they had incredible songs. Love songs that sounded like nothing else on earth. They were on the second time we played, as well as Slaughter & The Dogs.”
Ian and Debbie attended the second gig, unknowingly filing in alongside not only Barney, Hooky and Terry Mason, but many of the oncoming Mancunian rock illuminati.
Terry remembers sitting next to Malcolm McLaren: “We wouldn’t have known who he was but then – he was all rubber suited up and there’s us – looking back on it – naivety isn’t quite the right word, we weren’t particularly naïve but we’d never come into contact with lots of the people that were there. There’s a man there in a rubber suit. You don’t see many rubber suits.”
Famously, on the morning after the second gig, Hooky went out and purchased two items: a bass guitar for £35 – quite a hefty sum for a quasi-punk in 1976 – and an accompanying book, The Palmer Hughes Book of Rock ’n ’Roll, which came complete with a set of stickers that could be fixed on the guitar neck; useful and, what’s more, great fun even if they did dilute the image a little. Barney already had a guitar and an amp and was learning basic chords by then. Terry Mason was equally determined to learn an instrument.
The members of the budding band were all living at home, and all had mundane day jobs. If nothing else their immersion in music, whether reading the music press or holding loose practice sessions in bedrooms and kitchens offered a relief from daily tedium. Mostly their slowly evolving rehearsals took place at Barney’s gran’s house, which was closer to Manchester city centre. “We were both shit,” says Hooky with timehonoured succinctness. “I never thought I would grasp the basics. Barney kept showing me the chords.”
A series of sessions with entertainingly cacophonous results was an ongoing feature of their partnership. “Well, it sometimes makes me wonder… when I see very young bands today, just how much more adept they are than we were… and for a long time after that,” admits Hooky.
Pete Shelley remembers that after the second Pistols’ gig Barney, Hooky and Terry informed him of their musical ambitions. “They came up and the general gist was, ‘We’re thinking of starting a band, how do you do it, what do you need, how do we go about it?’ There was one time when we all got in a car and went off with John Maher1 to check out a drum kit that somebody was selling. I think Terry was supposed to be the drummer at first.”
In the wake of the Pistols, and with Buzzcocks, Slaughter & The Dogs and The Drones now starting to perform regularly, the developing Manchester punk scene was suddenly heavy with potential front-men. In retrospect, it seems almost bizarre to note that Ian Curtis, Steven Morrissey, and Mick Hucknall were all fluttering tentatively around this tiny and insular scene.
Although the London fanzine Sniffin’ Glue had famously proclaimed, “Here’s a chord… here’s another… now form a band!” it didn’t quite work like that. The Sex Pistols, it was noted, had been evolving – if only as a rhythm section – for several years. The Damned were practiced and studied musos. Joe Strummer had spent several years on the London pub circuit. Pete Shelley had fronted the Leigh based Jets Of Air. The Drones had been cabaret teen pop hopefuls Rockslide. The thrash of instant punk was, in truth, a ludicrous and artless cacophony. You had to learn to play. You had to knuckle down and put in the hours. Hooky has admitted, on numerous occasions, that he really didn’t think they would ever break through that solid barrier which separates the novice from the one whose fingers begin to move with a fluency born of hours spent practising. However, to the pair’s joint astonishment, their musicianship did continue to gel and improve.
The Sex Pistols would play in Manchester, at a different venue, on two further occasions towards the end of 1976. With their ‘Anarchy’ tour in tatters due to tabloid outcry, their concert schedule simply disintegrated into a mess of council-forced cancellations. Twenty scheduled dates were immediately whittled down to just three, though the good burghers of Manchester, it seemed, were immune to the paranoia that gripped their counterparts elsewhere in the UK. In December 1976, the Pistols played The Electric Circus twice in ten days, and on the first of these dates, December 9, Ian Curtis made the journey to the Collyhurst venue. As Ian had taken to scrawling the word ‘HATE’ across the rear of his jacket, it might have been seen as an act of provocation in an era when even the wearing of drainpipes jeans was ludicrously regarded as such.
This was to be a dramatic night that would be imprinted in the memory of all who attended. As Ian entered the club, he would have vanished into a pitch-black mess of debris and chaos, and this evening was even more edgy than usual. The hippie types, as yet unconvinced about punk rock’s surging momentum, scowled in the corners. The more outgoing punks, meanwhile, wore clothes which, unlike the punks of London, were largely homemade, at least in their efforts to provoke a punk statement: shirts nicked from dad’s wardrobe and scrawled over with biro slogans. But it was clumsy, ungainly artless apparel. Within The Electric Circus, at least, Ian Curtis’ latterly famous ‘HATE’ scrawl would have seemed perfectly at home.
As Hooky noted: “Ian was really wired when I first met him… at The Sex Pistols gig at The Electric Circus. It was probably the perfect introduction. He seemed out of it but so did everyone, I guess.”
A blinding flash of light exploded from the stage and came into vision: the stunning, leering ugliness of Johnny Rotten, larger than life, warped by flu, eyes flying from a speeding mind, staring eyes, accusing snarl. He was the pure physical embodiment of ‘grab it and run’, with attitude in buckets, and that rabid, unworldly leer. Something special was undoubtedly taking place; an intoxicating, illuminating exhilarating, inspiring experience. You could catch that attitude and cling to it, and carry it home. It was a complete night of punk too, with short swift sets from The Clash, Buzzcocks and Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers preceding the Pistols. In later years, many would try to recreate that atmosphere. All would fail.
Hooky: “From that night, every time we went to The Circus, Ian would seem to be there. He told us that he had some kind of band but I think he was just messing around, as were we really. But we didn’t have many options, to be honest. We were worried that we would never get on that bandwagon, frankly. Buzzcocks, Drones and Slaughter & The Dogs all seemed to be miles ahead of us. They all had their own identifiable sounds. They seemed to know what they were doing and we were just messing around.”
Terry Mason appeared to share their vision and became a vital aspect of the initial dynamic of the band: “After The Sex Pistols played there The Electric Circus started running two regular gigs a week with London bands coming up and we’d meet Ian and his mate Iain [Gray] there. It wasn’t a gentleman’s club but it was like being in on something early on. You’d recognise the people who are there. It’s like going to the football – when it used to be standing up – you’d recognise the people around you and then after a few years you’d grunt and nod at them from time to time. We were sort of on grunting and nodding terms with Ian and his mate. We were very quiet and Ian used to go a bit daft. Dancing and jumping about when bands were on. He just used to bounce more than anyone else.”
The music-based relationship between Ian and his friend Iain Gray had matured beyond a vague dream by this point. An amiable, intelligent character, Gray had attained a modest prowess on the guitar and he and Ian had embarked on embryonic rehearsals that would have mirrored the early stirrings of Barney, Hooky and Terry. While the vision was certainly intact, however, the wherewithal was lacking, leading to a state of hopeless and dreamy isolation which was extremely common at the time. The encouraging push of The Sex Pistols had inspired many would-be musicians to scamper to second hand music shops, and fumble in bedrooms over rudimentary chords.
As 1977 dawned, the atmosphere at The Electric Circus appeared to soften. Manchester was becoming Britain’s second punk city with The Electric Circus and The Ranch Bar remaining the central meeting points. Ian was just one of a number of intrigued ‘wannabees’ regularly attending both venues.
Steve Burke (Shy), who was working behind the bar at The Electric Circus, remembers Ian from those days. “We used to see Ian all the time but I wasn’t as familiar with him as I was with Barney, Hooky and Terry. I remember them when they used to go down to Pip’s Disco, to The Roxy Room in Pip’s, which used to play a lot of the better glam stuff… Bowie, Iggy, Velvets. A lot of the Manchester punks had initially been part of that glam scene. That’s how they got to know each other. But I don’t recall Ian from there. Actually, I found him a little bit more difficult to approach, I don’t know why. It could have been because one of the first times that I bumped into him at The Electric Circus, he accidentally knocked his pint all over me. It wasn’t his fault, but it was a bit clumsy. He was diving about all over the place with a pint in his hand. I think he apologised. There was no problem. But he seemed a little bit on edge, to me. I’m not sure I remember Debbie. I do recall another guy with him [Iain Gray]. He was certainly becoming a well-known face around town although he wasn’t one of the Salford or Moss Side lads. So he was seen as being a bit of an outsider, but amiable enough.”
Ian’s sister Carole didn’t figure Ian as a punk at this time. “When Ian was into his punk phase we were into discos,” she says, “though I would never class him as a punk rocker. I don’t remember seeing him in a jacket with ‘HATE’ on it. He might have stuck it on and then pulled it off when he went to work. He had a donkey jacket and a leather one. I could imagine him doing it, putting a sticker on – he did do things for effect. He was too stylish for the punk look though. He was ultra-fashionable – if it was a woman you’d say chic and up to date but with Ian it was a step ahead from what other people were wearing.”
At this time Ian and Debbie were still commuting together from Oldham to their jobs on different floors of the Sunley Building in Manchester’s Piccadilly, the tower building shooting up beside the Hotel Piccadilly and a high rise for the time.
One of the advantages of working in Manchester’s Piccadilly was that it offered Ian Curtis a chance to drift along to some of the more intriguing music ‘hang-outs’ in the city. Virgin Records, a natural lunchtime destination for any aspiring musician, was located in Lever Street, just across Piccadilly Gardens. Ian also spoke about his fondness for the Spin Inn Disc Shop, whose stock consisted mainly of northern soul records, situated on Cross Street. It was the specialist nature of the shop that appealed to him.
Perhaps more significant were the lunchtimes spent drifting into Piccadilly Plaza, the hideous and largely unpopulated concrete monstrosity situated beneath the prestigious Piccadilly Hotel. This was a soulless cavern-like shell, lined mostly by empty shop fronts, with crisp packets and cigarette ends underfoot and a vague smell of urine.
Ian had good reason to drift through that shell, however, for in contrast to its deadbeat appearance, it housed unlikely areas of glamour. The studios of Piccadilly Radio lay a short distance up the escalator on the first floor of the Sunley Building and, although as a commercial radio station it hardly represented the city’s growing punk awareness, it did monopolise the city’s airwaves and every pop star visiting Manchester could be seen drifting in for the obligatory interview.
More importantly, at least for Ian, would be the unlikely presence of the northern offices of RCA Records, an establishment manned at all times by the ebullient Derek Brandwood, head of promotion. Speaking in 2001, Brandwood noted: “I lived in a weird world where I would commute into this atmosphere of rock biz glamour. And the thing was that RCA really was a glamorous label even if it employed American promotional methods that didn’t necessarily work over here. But I would commute to work, driving in from a totally ordinary existence and then, suddenly, I would be a close friend of the most extraordinary array of people. RCA had Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Dolly Parton.”
Brandwood recalls Ian Curtis stopping by the office. “He was a likeable lad who would drop in every now and again. I can’t remember if he said he was starting a band. I probably gave him some promotional material. It was actually quite tedious in that office and Ian would have made a change from Piccadilly Radio DJs.”
Meanwhile, the nascent band featuring Hooky and Barney continued to limp on in a vaguely forward motion. The bedroom rehearsal practices petered out into a three-piece shrug, with an old school friend called Martin Gresty attempting to add vocals.
“The band seemed to be more a state of mind for a while,” says Terry Mason. “Barney had an amp, Hooky had a bass guitar, I had a guitar and couldn’t figure out what I was doing. We had to find a drummer and also a singer. You had your mates who you thought looked right – in this case there was a guy called Danny Lee who could out-Billy Idol Billy Idol. He could do his lip, he had the hair but he couldn’t be arsed. We weren’t even sure that he could sing but seeing as noone had any songs it didn’t really make that much difference. Then the idea was one of Barney’s mates would have a go. A lad called Wroey who lived near Barney’s gran. He came to punk a lot later on but did it a lot better than us. We were never quite right as punks. Even during the early days, when no one knew particularly what to wear. Basically you knew you had to throw away the flares. Anyway, then we realised that no one we knew was ever going to be a singer. So that’s when Barney put the advert in Virgin.”
The Virgin noticeboard proved instrumental in attracting a further array of potential front-men. Terry Mason: “There was one I remember – this guy, he was mentally disturbed. And yet again we’re at this situation where we were completely moving away from our safety zone – what we knew and understood. We were quite insular. We were having to see people we didn’t know and see if we wanted to be in a band with them. This one that me and Barney went to see – he was great on the phone. He said he wrote songs. We went round and, of course, we were expecting someone to look fairly similar to us – you know shortish hair, whatever. This guy looked like one of the early reject moulds for Mick Hucknall. He had red hair that stuck up like that and he appeared to be wearing a cushion – this top that had a head-hole and arm-holes in. I think it may have been orange. Or was it two-tone? The facing bit was more in velour and the back was in satin. We’re there thinking, ‘What we going to do? Let’s see what he’s got’. He then proceeds to pull out a three-string balalaika that he’s built himself. And he starts to play these songs and we’re in his house and we don’t know what to do. We had to sit through this guy’s mental illness and then we said we can’t give him anything just yet – we’ve got to see who else answers the ad. Then, fortunately, Ian answered. Otherwise it would have been a very bad band.”
For the untested Curtis, auditioning for any kind of band must have seemed a daunting prospect. As it turned out, his audition was nothing like what he might have expected, for Barney had an idea to organise a bonding session to see if Ian would fit comfortably into the band’s embryonic dynamic. Quite how this would demonstrate his abilities as a front-man is a difficult to ascertain, but it certainly broke the ice.
Terry Mason: “The audition wasn’t an audition. We sort of vaguely knew him and we’d been scared by the balalaika man – you know we didn’t want any more of that. The audition was we wanted to see if we liked him. We took him out to Ashfield Valley [in Rochdale] and we went wandering about in all the mud and crap. Yes, walking out in the country, jumping over bits of streams and that. Ian had come quite well dressed. I had boots with holes in. I ended up with plastic bags wrapped round my feet. We were running about in the woods, and, of course, Barney being completely prepared came in wellingtons. He didn’t bother to tell anyone else you’d probably need all this, and he’s there just laughing at us. Ian certainly got his feet wet that day. And that was the audition.”
With Ian on board, the trio started to rehearse regularly in Salford. Iain Gray just fell into the background. “We never really knew him,” says Hooky. “I don’t know how serious it all was… but we were moving so fast we barely took notice.”
Terry Mason: “At that point – I mean it was a bonus when we found Ian could sing. And he had all these index cards with bits of songs on bits of paper. But it was more – well, he looks about right, we get on with him. Oh, the other thing was he had a PA. Of course it’s not what you think of when you think PA. He had these two WEM column speakers and this tiny PA amp. He had equipment! He was serious! That was an even better sign. The first rehearsals probably would have been at the Swan. It’s a pile of rubble nowadays. It was near where I used to live in Weaste, a rough arse Salford pub. I sorted out the Swan because my cousin was the chairman of the Salford branch of the Manchester City supporters club, which had its meetings in the Swan, and I said we needed a room to rehearse. Even though they paid a tenner or whatever to use it for their meetings they just let us use it for free and it was great. I think Barney used to pick Ian up on his bike and drop him off at the station. Or if Ian was in work he’d make his own way… no he wouldn’t – he was useless at that, he’d probably need to get a lift off Barney or Hooky.”
The band didn’t actually use the same room as the City supporters but chose instead to use a bigger room that was not as plush – more like a junk room. The next step for the band was to find a suitable drummer.
Terry Mason: “We met all sorts – some were nice people. There were some who banged a knife and fork on a plate and thought that was drumming. You had to know a bit more than that – otherwise I’d still be in the band. We had this situation with drummers so I decided to trade in Iain Gray’s amp – just to rub salt into Iain’s wounds, when Ian joined us I bought Iain’s equipment – and I got a drum kit. It was a very cool looking drum kit – covered in black leatherette, rather than being a silver sparkle one. Then I realised that drumming was quite difficult. So I thought I’d get some lessons and in the meantime we’re still looking for drummers and we found Anthony Tabac.”
Tony Tabac was a likeable, intelligent and laid-back character who initially seemed well suited to the band. It was only later, after playing an initial six gigs, that it became clear that he wasn’t fitting snugly into the dynamic of the band. Terry, though valiantly trying to learn both guitar and drums with the idea of becoming part of the group, was coming around to the idea that musicianship was perhaps not his forte. Nevertheless, they settled down into a regular rehearsal routine, mainly at the Swan. In the absence of any talent for either guitar or drums, Terry Mason tentatively assumed the role of manager, arranging and organising things for the band.
Meanwhile, the Manchester punk scene had suddenly gained some small credence in the national music press. Local gig reviews by Paul Morley had started to appear in NME, and by Ian Wood in Sounds. A new venue, The Band On The Wall on Swan Street – a jazz club and pub which had a curiously London ambience – provided the perfect platform where both the bigger bands like Buzzcocks and the Drones, and a number of developing outfits, could gain experience.
On March 3, 1977, Ian and Debbie went to Manchester Apollo to catch Iggy Pop’s infamous Idiot tour, just one of a lavish peppering of key events which took place in the city around this period. This particular Iggy tour included the not inconsiderable added attraction of David Bowie playing keyboards, a high level inclusion that caused slight panic among promoters who instructed their ticket sales staff to inform customers that it would “not be a David Bowie performance, you know”. Not that Iggy Pop needed introducing to the swelling punk audience of the city.
It was another electrifying, stimulating and utterly inspiring evening, with the crowd all too well aware that they were witnessing exactly the right performer at exactly the right time… and seemingly in exactly the right city.1
For Ian, now so close to making his own onstage debut, the sight of Iggy Pop, completely consumed by his own level of stagemanship, must have been truly inspiring, partly through the sheer physicality of his performance and partly through his almost unique ability to lift the music simply by being there.
Typically, for an extreme night at Manchester Apollo in 1977, the ludicrous battle between security guards instructed to keep the crowd seated and an audience who, understandably, had no intention of remaining seated, raged on for most of the concert. When Iggy Pop signalled for a final surge the bouncers retreated, allowing the crowd to swell to the front, ecstatic with their minor victory.
Ian left The Apollo in a state of exhilaration. In witnessing the performance, Ian Curtis had taken a step closer to realising his own dream.
Throughout the spring of 1977 Terry and Ian met in Manchester regularly during the daytime. Terry: “We’d meet up at lunchtime when he was working in town and read the music papers. The pair of us by that point were eagerly waiting for the music papers coming out – Sounds and NME – and devoured the lot and we were just running over it with each other. We used to say things like: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to go to the CBGB club or whatever.’”1
Determined to try and make something happen the pair would also ring up record companies. “Because we didn’t have a phone we used to go to Kendall’s,” says Terry. “They had a nice phone that was inside the building so it was quiet. It wasn’t like you were ringing up Virgin Records and they could hear all the traffic in the background. So we’d be filling the machine full of 10ps to try and get tapes in and see if anyone was about.”
In this age of blanket mobile phone use it is easy to forget that they are a relatively recent phenomenon. Terry didn’t have the luxury of a phone at home either and remembers: “Then, even using the phone for business… where I worked you weren’t allowed to make a business phone call before 1pm unless you got your manager’s permission. And if someone rang you at work everyone in the room would be staring and throwing you daggers.”
This lack of a phone became the vital factor that later prevented Terry acting as the group’s manager.
In May 1977, to Deborah’s delight, and possibly Ian’s too, the couple managed to move to Barton Street in Macclesfield, via another short stint with Ian’s grandparents in Stamford Street.
This was a double-fronted, terraced house with a communal yard. It was situated on a corner and consequently narrowed towards the rear end, giving the house an oddly triangular appearance from parts of the inside, particularly in Ian’s ‘blue’ room (on the left of the front door alongside the ginnel) and, to a lesser extent, the kitchen at the rear.
By day, Debbie and Ian would jointly commute to Manchester and, during the evenings that Ian wasn’t locked in the dusty practice room in Salford, he would evidently brood at home, smoking, scribbling lyrics and listening to records by bands that were considerably further down the line.
The move to Barton Street was unfortunately timed. The trauma that accompanies any house move is arduous at the best of times but this move coincided with the build-up to the band’s first gig, naturally enough at The Electric Circus where they had secured a prestigious support spot to Buzzcocks along with Penetration and John Cooper Clarke. Such a debut would ensure instant exposure to the Manchester rock fraternity.
From the outset, Ian Curtis had recognised the value of hanging out, as much as possible, with Buzzcocks and their manager Richard Boon. As it happened, Boon and Shelley lived on the same road – Lower Broughton in Salford. Indeed, the name Stiff Kittens, which Ian’s band was originally called, seems to have originated from an incident that involved the Buzzcocks.
Recalls Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks: “We played the Ranch Bar. The Ranch was the place that was happening in as much as… well, it wasn’t a full on gay bar… this was an under age drinking den really. In order to play there we had to go and see Foo Foo Lamarr1. So we made an appointment and saw him at his sauna. He was in towels and we arranged to do a gig at the Ranch Bar. Anyway, as we were bringing the gear down the stairs – they were steep the stairs down to the basement bar – and the premise’s cat had had kittens and somebody stood on one. We all thought it was dead, a goner – hence stiff kittens. It didn’t die… no kittens were harmed in the making of… but it had its moment of looking like it was.”
Buzzcocks, be it Pete Shelley or Richard Boon, subsequently suggested ‘Stiff Kittens’ as a name for this new band out of Salford. It may not have held enough mystique to remain their name for long, but it did create an initial stir around Manchester.
Terry Mason: “What we had was two parallel courses at this point. There was the band, project Stiff Kittens or whatever, who used to talk to Pete Shelley. We were Shelley’s mates. Hooky was learning bass out of a book and Barney was a bit smug because he’d had a guitar for years and could play a bit. I still had the idea to play guitar. We thought we were a band because we were talking to Shelley. [At the same time] Ian used to spend more time talking to Richard Boon. Meeting up with Shelley… we found out where he lived, it was not that far from Barney’s gran’s… we went round and that, again, was the biggest shock we’d ever had. First of all we’re now talking to someone who is quite openly gay. We’re from Salford, late Sixties, Seventies. Salford didn’t do gay. Well they did but it was someone called Lawrence. Everyone called them Lol and you had to watch yourself around them.”
During the nervous build-up to the debut gig, Stiff Kittens became Warsaw, though the name change wasn’t easy. Ian Curtis had never warmed to the idea of Stiff Kittens, believing it to be the kind of name that a copycat punk band would use. Even at this early stage, it seems, Ian was looking beyond the obvious trappings of a punk ‘movement’ that was beginning to attract sheep-like tendencies. In Manchester, despite producing many excellent and exciting shows, The Drones were certainly falling into this trap by writing lyrics such as,“… I wanna see the Queen at the end of a beam… I wanna see the Pope at the end of a rope…” It was all becoming a little cartoon-like. This was understandable in view of how the desire to shock was close to the punk ethos but the band that Ian Curtis was about to lead had ideas based around a more intelligent but equally controversial alternative.
Hooky, reminiscing during the time of the 1988 re-packaging of Joy Division product, recalled: “Ian really wanted something darker than Stiff Kittens, which none of us really liked. I think ‘Progrom’ was another possibility and we almost became ‘Gdansk’ at one point.”
From that standpoint, it’s easy to understand the transition to Warsaw, adopted partly in reverence to the gloomy David Bowie Low track, ‘Warszawa’.
The change didn’t occur until after the Stiff Kittens moniker had attached itself to the bottom of a bill that rose through Penetration, regular visitors to Manchester down from Durham, John Cooper Clarke and, finally Buzzcocks, although their performances would be capped by what was by now becoming a regular climactic appearance by John The Postman, surging through ‘Louie Louie’ to close the evening. One of the poster runs for the evening failed to mention either Stiff Kittens or Warsaw and, in its place, added the Birmingham band, The Prefects.
Anyone who has been in or around a band at their inception can understand the trepidation, if not sheer terror, felt by the untried musicians, that petrifying leap from the practice room to a stage. To compound their anxiety, Warsaw really did find themselves performing in front of most of the Manchester movers and shakers, largely because this show would prove to be one of the integral Electric Circus ‘punk Sundays’, a weekly rendezvous where scenesters had the opportunity to judge the cream of punk related bands from Britain and America – The Clash on their White Riot Tour, The Jam, Stranglers, Ramones/Talking Heads, Vibrators – all parading before them.
The presence of Stiff Kittens/Warsaw was, naturally enough, a fairly low-key affair. Being at the bottom of the bill, under whatever name, was to perform early doors, before most of the audience had arrived. Nonetheless, the sparse audience included various members of The Drones, standing by the bar and casting nervous glances towards the stage, Paul Morley from NME, Ian Wood from Sounds, and many of the instantly recognisable faces of the scene.
Mick Middles watched the entire gig under the impression that it was The Prefects. “I don’t know why we were duped in such a way,” he says. “I think we had actually already seen The Prefects at that point anyway. At the end of the set I told Steve Shy that I really like The Prefects whereupon he informed me, ‘That was a band from Manchester and they are called Warsaw’. The difference was that we hadn’t really recognised Ian as the guy who used to hang around the Circus. Now he was in a band, he seemed dif-ferent.”
Paul Morley, who stood next to the Shy Talk and Ghast UP fanzine contingent throughout the performance, noted in his NME review “… there is a quirky cockiness about the lads that made me think, for some reason of The Faces, twinkling evil charm.”
This was an extremely perceptive comment and it’s difficult to understand how Morley could have reached this conclusion from just one performance. In latter years, the laddish camaraderie of Warsaw/Joy Division and New Order would attain huge infamy and, rather like The Faces, their gang-like mentality would certainly flavour their better performances.
“I knew Ian reasonably well,” says Morley. “I guess Ian knew me as well because by then I was writing for NME and he was a big fan of NME. I was the local writer for NME so in a funny sort of way from early on I was somebody that Ian knew of. When he met me he knew who I was because I’d already started writing for NME and I’d written about them before I met him. For early Warsaw I wasn’t necessarily that overwhelmed by them. I thought they were unformed a little bit, not quite finished. I think he knew that as well, that they weren’t great, they weren’t magnificent, they were just an ordinary local band. I think in a funny sort of way he quite respected that – in the way that good people in music do, they like to be challenged a little bit. And if they understand and appreciate that it’s for a good reason. I mean I wasn’t nasty, I just said ‘Here’s an interesting band, bit like this, bit like that, could be great.’”
Despite gaining positive reviews in both NME and Sounds on the back of one edgy performance, Warsaw continued to improve through a modest series of gigs during the summer of 1977 with Tony Tabac still occupying the drum seat. Two days later they played at Rafters, supporting Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers in front of a disappointingly small audience.
Terry Mason remembers bumping into the former New York Doll and his band in a fish and chip shop before the gig. “After we’d had what passed as a sound check we went out to get something to eat. To our surprise there’s Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers in the queue as well. For one of those bizarre moments it brought it home that you were really in a band. They’d been doing it for five years. It seems silly but there we were in the same chippy as two of the legendary New York Dolls and they’d just done a sound check as well.”
At their first gig Warsaw had asked Penetration what they knew about other gig opportunities. As a result they got the chance to play a few days later, on June 2 – the day of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee – at Newcastle Town Hall annex with Penetration, and The Adverts from London. Of course there was no money on offer for Warsaw. It was a bank holiday and there was no way they could afford to rent a van, particularly as it would have had to be rented for the whole weekend. Terry and Hooky knew a lad named Danny MacQueenie from school and he agreed to drive them up to Newcastle at no cost in his 7-ton Luton furniture van that he used for work. Two of them were able to sit in the front but the others had to endure the whole journey in a huge, boomy, unlit van, bracing themselves around corners, sitting on sacks, not knowing where they were with Ian peering periodically out through small holes in the steel walls. At one point Ian exclaimed: “I think we’re lost I’m sure we’ve just gone past Scotch Corner three times.”
Terry: “When we finally arrived we turned up in a van bigger than any of the other bands or even the PA hire van and we jumped out and between the lot of us there was only just one small amp to bring out of it.” The group had no need to bring any instruments or kit since, to save time, all the groups were sharing gear that day.
Another Rafters gig followed on from this, as well as a couple of memorable shows at Manchester’s Squat Club. Of particular interest was a gig at the Squat where they appeared second on a bill topped by The Fall with John The Postman’s Puerile and The Worst below them.
The Squat was an old Victorian school hall situated off Oxford Road (near the current Contact Theatre), named because an anarchic fringe of Manchester Polytechnic students had squatted there to draw attention to the lack of student accommodation. Once a hall of learning, it had now become the perfect punk venue. The Fall were the leading downbeat intellectuals of the time. By contrast, John The Postman had expanded his one man act into a full scale band with a humorous edge while The Worst, managed by Steve Shy, really were a band of little ability but massive attitude. In the middle of all this came Warsaw. It was an edgy, nervous performance with Barney’s guitar registering far too loudly and Ian Curtis’ vocals uncomfortably low in the mix. Nobody took any serious interest. It was a frustrating evening.
Buzzcock Steve Diggle recalls early sightings of Ian and Warsaw: “I can’t remember the first time I met Ian, to be honest. It would have been just after the time with Stiff Kittens. I think Pete and Richard knew them before me, though I am not sure why. I do remember seeing Warsaw at The Electric Circus. It was very raw, very much a young band trying to find their way. I think it would be right to suggest that, at that point, they weren’t quite sure which way they would be moving in terms of music. That’s perfectly natural. They sounded a bit like a rougher version of The Banshees, who were one band who were never as bad as they made out in terms of musicianship. That was often the case with bands at that point. They pretended to be more inept than they actually were. That thing about learning two chords and then climbing onstage, well, that was OK but then you still had to do it once you had got on that stage. We had all been playing a little longer than was claimed at the time. But Warsaw did seem very raw.”
Lest we forget, Ian Curtis was still employed in what might be regarded as a professional capacity during the first stirrings of Joy Division. He and Debbie had not been long in the house in Macclesfield before Ian obtained a transfer from his job at Manpower Services in central Manchester. His new position was as ‘Assistant Disablement Resettlement Officer’ based, most conveniently, at the Employment Exchange in Macclesfield. This job would give Ian no little satisfaction as he was able to help those who had struggled with work due to illness or disablement, offering advice about benefits to which disabled people were entitled to claim or steering them back or towards some kind of suitable employment. Ironically, given how Ian would subsequently suffer from epilepsy, he worked with people who suffered from this particular condition and every month, as part of his job, visited the David Lewis Centre in Alderley Edge. To this day the Centre cares for both adults and children suffering from severe epilepsy and other associated neurological problems. They provide assessment, care and treatment to enable such individuals to develop to their maximum potential.
Although Ian found his new job rewarding, and later may have even considered returning to it, his experiences at the David Lewis Centre left a bad picture in his mind regarding epilepsy. He saw some of the worst possible cases and it touched his tender heart. The impression it left in his mind would unquestionably lead to a degree of pessimism, even hopelessness, with regard to his own epileptic diagnosis in the not too far distant future.
After about six gigs with Warsaw Tony Tabac’s enthusiasm had started to wane. “Anthony Tabac drummed at the May gig at The Electric Circus,” recalls Terry. “I think he did Johnny Thunders at Rafters. And he certainly did the Penetration gig at Newcastle, and probably a gig at the Squat. His last gig was Rafters on June 30. He was middle-class and awfully nice. We could never figure out if it was his sister or his girlfriend that was always round him. He just wasn’t reliable. I think he was concentrating on his other business. So then we had to find another drummer.”
The band’s growing reputation meant that a number of potential drummers had started to gather with intent. One of them, perhaps the most vociferous, was Steve Brotherdale, a fast-talker on the scene who was not lacking in self-belief. There are suggestions that Brotherdale even attempted to prise Ian Curtis away from Joy Division to become the lead singer with his ‘other’ band, Panik, ironically managed by Rob Gretton.
Mick Middles recalls meeting Brotherdale at The Band On The Wall. “He was making phone calls from the foyer, talking deals and rock biz, talking big. No one really took any offence but it didn’t seem too real.”
Later he would become known as Steve B’Dale and take up the drum position with Manchester glam band V2. Although he proved quite successful in this role, Brotherdale’s bombastic character never seemed suited to the dynamic of Warsaw. However, he did hold the drum seat during Warsaw’s first venture into a recording studio.
On July 18, 1977, the band – with Brotherdale on drums – booked into Pennine Sound Studios in Oldham for one night. Although only a grubby four-track studio, it was nonetheless perfectly adequate for the first recordings by a rudimentary band.
Five songs were completed, all of which would appear on various bootleg releases during the forthcoming decades, including the highly prized ‘Dal Cuore Della Citta’/‘From The Centre Of The City’. The other songs – ‘Inside The Line’, ‘Gutz’, ‘The Kill’ and ‘At A Later Date’—were all a bit too close to The Stranglers, complete with over-dominant bass line.
To the band it felt like a release, of sorts, and Ian Curtis, spiked with an ambition that far outweighed the promise of that tape, thrust copies in the direction of fanzine scribblers in The Electric Circus. Steve Shy and Martin Martyn both seemed singularly unimpressed, as did Paul Morley, who was simultaneously beginning to realise that a life spent in the managerial hot seat with The Drones was perhaps a little misguided and wouldn’t endear him to the powers-that-be at NME where his real ambition lay.
Whatever the reaction to these earliest recordings, they proved to be the swansong for drummer Steve Brotherdale. Terry Mason was far from impressed with him. “Steve Brotherdale… Steve bigmouth,” he says. “I’m sure he had some redeeming features somewhere but they weren’t obvious. He annoyed me intensely. It was that he’d sort of been in bands before and all of a sudden he was a punk. He wasn’t of the same sort of mentality as us lot. He saw this as another band to be in. He wasn’t one of us. He wasn’t right. He was completely false. But yet again punk was hitting this momentum where all these people who’d come in late on it looked far better at it than we did – the people who’d been there. Years later people appeared with hair like [a Mohican] and pins and all that shit. We were into that secret early on.”
Brotherdale’s occupation of the drum seat was never secure as far as the rest of the band were concerned and he soon fell foul of Barney and Hooky’s barbed Salfordian wit. Next up was Steve Morris, a far more promising candidate.
Terry Mason: “After Brotherdale left Steve Morris came in. Steve somehow contacted Ian. Steve was never really in the little gang. [He] was quite different from all of us again. He was basically… rich. His parents had a company that he worked for. They did fitted kitchens. Bespoke of course, none of your MFI rubbish.”
Steve Morris, born in Macclesfield on October 28, 1957, had, like Ian, attended King’s School. They also shared a similar accent although arguably Steve’s was the broader of the two. Despite Steve’s comparative affluence, there was nothing snobbish about him. “Steve was a right yokel,” adds Terry. “He could have had a smock and a straw in his teeth.”
After a nervous audition, held at the Abraham Moss Centre in Crumpsall, North Manchester, it was clear that Steve was obviously blessed with capabilities well beyond all previous drummers they’d tried. He was also well-educated, as Terry noted: “Steve seemed to have read stuff that we’d never read. We were very undereducated. It seems ridiculous because we went to a grammar school but we managed to do that and not come away with an awful lot of education. We had barely read anything.”
The band continued gigging locally with Steve Morris in the drum seat and among those struck by the change was Vini Reilly, then starting out with Ed Banger & The Nosebleeds and who would later gain recognition with Durutti Column. Reilly had not been particularly impressed by the early band. “My first thought was that Barney was a bad guitar player,” he says. “The thing was I didn’t like the tone he had on his guitar. I thought ‘Why’s he using that tone. It’s all wrong and it doesn’t work. It’s neither one thing nor another, a really spiky and silly tone.’ What did hit me was that Steve the [new] drummer was very, very unusual. The drum patterns that he was using were really bizarre and I’d not heard patterns like that before. That intrigued me. Ian was quite laid back at that gig1 I seem to remember. He didn’t really go for it but I thought he was definitely interesting and I knew he was the Ian I’d met in ’75 so I was intrigued to see what he was actually like.
“It was very, very untogether and a bit of a barrage. I thought they hadn’t rehearsed. I was looking at the equipment they were using and I was obsessed with the fact that the tone on the guitar was wrong. As I said Ian wasn’t going for it, he was quite repressed at that gig. But, even though he was repressed – I could hardly hear what he was saying as the PA system was so bad so his vocals were quite muffled but he kept coming out with these lines that were just not lines that lead singers sang. They usually sang about, you know, clichés and everything that Ian sang was not a cliché it was just different. So the two things that were really different were Ian and Steve the drummer.”
Vini nonetheless gained respect for Barney’s playing later on, and changed his mind about his guitar tone. “If it had any other tone then it wouldn’t have worked. It was a spiky, silly tone. He was really thrashing the guitar, Barney, but there was no power there. I thought they hadn’t got a powerful enough amp or the guitar’s not got powerful enough pick-ups. It just wasn’t right. I think that’s how, accidentally, Barney’s tone in Joy Division evolved.
“As it is with most guitarists – it’s just accidental. Coincidences and stuff. On Unknown Pleasures it was the only tone that would work.”
Meanwhile, ‘out there’ in punk Manchester, the thin scattering of local bands was starting to become repetitive. No matter how many ambitious teenagers were struggling over their chords and triplets, the scene had really only thrown up three serious contenders, Buzzcocks, Slaughter & The Dogs and The Drones, and once you’d seen them all three or four times there wasn’t much else left to see.
The Electric Circus, a slightly dangerous, paranoia inducing building when full, was always ill-fated and subject to closure from the authorities. When that happened, when it was initially forced to close at the beginning of October 1977, the punks took it as a sign of oppression, that they were not being allowed to party. Having something in common to fight for naturally acted as a bonding element, and in fact inspired a hitherto unseen feeling of camaraderie. It certainly led to a situation where the final weekend at The Electric Circus became one of the essential gigs of 1977 for any band within the Manchester area.
Everything about 1977 had combined to make The Electric Circus something way more than a crumbling ex-bingo hall in a deadbeat area of town. By the autumn months, the venue had been raised to another level entirely, where an atmosphere of sheer exhilaration co-existed with delicious unease. The sense that somehow this was special, the lovely depravity, the appalling stomach churning beer, the lack of health and safety measures, the filthiest toilets in Manchester (the only other contender was the Mayflower). It was all this and everything else, and it all came together in a climactic fulfilment in the final weekend of October 2 and 3, 1977.
Ian Curtis arrived at the frenzied scene on the Saturday, and was evidently determined to force Warsaw onto the stage that day but eventually settled for an appearance on day two.
Mick Middles saw Paul Morley emerge from the club to greet the queue with the words: “Everyone who is anybody is already in. Why are you not in there?” He laughed and, pulling rank as an obvious guest lister, waltzed back through the crowd and up the steps.
Not so Ian Curtis. Not for him the triumphant arrival of a genuine artist. Not a star… barely an artist, he shunned the very notion of ‘specialness’, and stood meekly in the queue. “I think we are on today,” he shrugged, simultaneously buying a copy of the Sheffield fanzine, Gun Rubber from a red-panted, white-haired Bowie-punk called Martyn Ware who would one day front Heaven 17.
Rumours were rife among the crowd and in the dressing room. Virgin Records would be recording the event for posterity, no doubt as a kind of parallel album to the London live punk compilation, Live At The Roxy. It would be rough and ready, without a doubt – and it was – but would hopefully capture some sense of atmosphere. In effect it did, largely because of Paul Morley’s evocative sleeve notes. By the time the record would eventually surface, in April 1978, Warsaw – who would then be called Joy Division – would have been allotted just one track, ‘At A Later Date’, memorable largely because Ian Curtis would scream, “Do you all remember Rudolf Hess?” at the start of the song.
The recording was significant insofar as it demonstrated just how far the band had travelled during the intervening six months. On the last night of The Electric Circus, Warsaw were spirited though incoherent. Once beyond The Fall and Buzzcocks, Mick Middles felt that theirs would prove one of the most memorable sets of the entire weekend.
Terry Mason felt otherwise. “No one gave a shit,” he says. “It was only after Joy Division became so famous that gigs like this become memorable.”
Tony Wilson remembered seeing Warsaw, though, and noticing something “different” about Ian: “The two memories I took from that was that it was an absolute caterwauling of sound. It was completely punk in that it had completely no technique whatsoever. There was just an absolute barrage of fucking noise. It wasn’t stupid punk or false punk it was real punk. It was completely anarchic and just a fucking mess. Glorious loud noisy mess. But, I can remember thinking that the lead singer had something very strange and very special about him. I remember thinking he was a bit weird and interesting. The band sounded shit but he looked special.”
Photographer Kevin Cummins, alongside Paul Morley a member of the pseudo-band The Negatives, who played two sets during the weekend, recalls a strange atmosphere inside the venue. “The thing about The Electric Circus crowd was that the room was split, almost into two or three bits. You had the upstairs balcony, where people used to go and have sex and take drugs. You had the downstairs bit at the bar, where three hundred people would run around. Then you had the front bit, for the bands, where all the people who had just read The Mirror and The People who would write these absurd over the top punk articles… and they would have read these articles and believed them and believed that the thing to do was to go and gob at bands. So, most of us, the actual people in the Manchester scene, would go and stand at the back. Just past the DJ booth, and we would stand around talking for most of the time and then, if anyone came on who we liked, we might wander up to the front.
“On the last weekend at The Electric Circus, where Joy Division made their debut on vinyl on that live EP, the only people at the front were all the people who wouldn’t normally have gone to gigs. Some of them were people who were trying to make a name for themselves but were never really involved, and the music press people who came from London for the weekend. They all went down the front. But most of us stood at the back for it. We – The Negatives – went on and played both nights… I’ve a got a tape of that. We had a different vocalist on each night. We had this mate of Paul’s (Morley) on vocals for the first night and Pete Shelley on vocals for the second night. All the bands were playing for the Pat Seed Scanner Fund, which was the big Manchester thing at the time. And that was important because we all felt that it was about time that Manchester punks proved that they could do some good and not be just a bunch of arseholes. Unfortunately, that all backfired because the two guys who ran the club fucked off with all the money. I remember taking a picture of Alan from The Worst and Pete Shelley presenting a cheque for £750, which had been raised on that night then, the next thing I know, the old bill are around at my house, telling me that the cheque had bounced and they started asking me what I knew about the two guys who ran The Electric Circus.
“But I think that Warsaw came out of that rather well. Perhaps better than any other band… apart, perhaps from The Fall, who were far more advanced. They were still naïve but there was something about Ian that stood out. Of course, the place was full of record company A&R men and none of them noticed Ian’s talent, did they? Typical, really.”
1 Buzzcocks drummer.
1 This is not to be confused, as it so often is, with a similar – albeit Bowie-less – performance at the same venue, later in the year; this time captured for posterity by the cameras of Tony Wilson’s second series of So It Goes.
1 CBGBs in New York was originally intended to feature country, bluegrass and blues but it became famous as the springboard for Blondie, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Television and others.
1 Manchester club owner and drag celebrity.
1 Reilly is probably referring to The Electric Circus show on October 3.