Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division Read online

  UNKNOWN

  PLEASURES

  Also by Peter Hook

  The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2012 by Peter Hook

  Image credits: page 9, top: Kevin Cummins © Getty Images; page 9 bottom: Attempts have been made to track down the copyright holder to no avail; page 14, bottom: © Christopher Hewitt; page 15, top: Pierre Rene Worms; endpapers: Kevin Cummins © Getty Images

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Peter Hook to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-85720-215-4 (Hardback)

  ISBN: 978-0-85720-216-1 (Trade Paperback)

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85720-217-8

  Typeset in the UK by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Dedicated, with love, to my mother Irene

  and her sister, Jean.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Prologue: January 1978

  Part One: ‘Insight’

  ‘For seventeen days that’s all we had: chicken and chips’

  ‘You can take the boy out of Salford but you can’t take Salford out of the boy’

  ‘Barney would always eat on his own or in the bath’

  ‘Oh, fuck, it’s Steve Harley’

  Timeline One: May 1948–April 1976

  Part Two: ‘Disorder’

  ‘Normal band, normal night, few people watching, clap-clap, very good’

  ‘Is that a bass guitar?’

  ‘He was just a kid with “Hate” on his coat’

  ‘He was one of us’

  ‘I can’t actually think of anything less “us” than a wet-towel fight’

  ‘The twats were flicking the Vs up’

  ‘Apart from the odd pint pot in the gob it was a good gig’

  ‘Even the shit ones were pretty good’

  ‘I told him exactly where he could stick his vibrators’

  Timeline Two: June 1976–December 1977

  Part Three: ‘Transmission’

  ‘It was like The X Factor for punks’

  ‘We need to get rid of this Nazi artwork’

  ‘The biggest rain of spit I’ve ever seen in my life’

  Timeline Three: January 1978–December 1978

  Part Four: ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’

  ‘Peter’s fell off his chair again’

  ‘Fuck. Martin’s got a boot full of stolen car radios’

  ‘It sounds like a fucking helicopter’

  ‘He was looking for that spark’

  ‘Not that I’d change anything’

  ‘Stop fucking moaning, Hooky’

  ‘I just went for a piss’

  ‘You shouldn’t trust a word I say’

  ‘Bring it on’

  ‘Turned out to be horse meat’

  ‘He’s possessed by the devil, that twat’

  Unknown Pleasures Track by Track

  Timeline Four: January–December 1979

  Part Five: ‘Ceremony’

  ‘A right mother hen’

  ‘We carried on’

  ‘He thought we were pricks – and how right he was’

  ‘His mum got the blood out by washing it in a bath of salt water’

  ‘We were so excited about going to America’

  ‘I never said goodbye’

  Epilogue

  Closer Track by Track

  Timeline Five: January1980–October 1981

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  This book is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth . . . as I remember it!

  Peter Hook, 2012

  INTRODUCTION

  It’s a strange life. Normally I don’t include any other people in my writing. Everyone remembers the same things completely differently. The contradictions really confuse you and spoil everything, making you question yourself and what happened. I proved it to myself by letting a very close friend see what I had written. He replied with a great comment: ‘What’s the point of all this?’

  So, answers on a postcard, please.

  Hooky

  X

  PROLOGUE

  January 1978

  Our first gig as Joy Division and it ended in a fight. Typical.

  Not our first gig. Before that we’d been called Warsaw but, for reasons I’ll explain later, we couldn’t carry on being called Warsaw so we’d had to think of a new name. Boys in Bondage was one of the many suggestions and we very nearly went with another, the Slaves of Venus, which just goes to show how desperate we were getting.

  It was Ian who suggested Joy Division. He found it in a book he was reading, House of Dolls, by Ka-Tzetnik 135633. He then passed it round for all of us to read. In the book, ‘Joy Divisions’ was the name given to groups of Jewish women kept in the concentration camps for the sexual pleasure of the Nazi soldiers. The oppressed, not the oppressors. Which in a punky, ‘No Future’ sort of way was exactly what we were trying to say with the name. It was a bit like Slaves of Venus, except not crap.

  So that was decided: we were Joy Division. Little did we know what we were letting ourselves in for, that for years people would be asking us, ‘Are you Nazis?’

  ‘No. We’re not fucking Nazis. We’re from Salford.’

  So anyway, we had this gig at Pips Discotheque (formerly Nice ‘N’ Easy) on Fennel Street in Manchester. It was our first official gig as Joy Division, though it had been advertised as Warsaw (the name change came over Christmas), and we were pretty excited come the night – me especially, because that day I’d been out and bought a brand-new guitar.

  I’d been paranoid about my old one since recording our EP An Ideal for Living. Barney had told me it was out of tune between the F and the G. I didn’t know what that meant but it sounded serious. So I’d saved up for a new one, a Hondo II, Rickenbacker Stereo Copy (I beat the guy down from £99 to £95) and tonight was its debut. Not only that but I had a lot of mates coming to see us – the Salford lot, we’ll call them: Alex Parker and his brother, Ian, Twinny, and all the lads from the Flemish Weaver on Salford Precinct, my local.

  Before the show started Ian Curtis had been listening to TransEurope Express by Kraftwerk over the PA. He loved that record. He must have given it to the DJ to play as our intro music, and I’m not sure if he was planning to get up on stage from the dance floor, or what he was intending to do really, but he was on the dance floor and he was sort of kicking broken glass around as Trans-Europe Express was playing. Kind of kicking it and moving round to the music at the same time.

  We already knew Ian was driven, and recently we’d been seeing how volatile he could sometimes be. He was going through a phase of acting up a bit, shall we say. A frontman thing, of course, and partly his Iggy Pop fascination, but also frustration – frustration that we weren’t getting anywhere, that other Manchester bands were doing better than us, getting more gigs than us. The Drones had an album out. The Fall, the Panik
and Slaughter & the Dogs all had singles out, and their records weren’t all muffled and shit-sounding like ours. To cap it all, here we were, our first gig as Joy Division, and only about thirty people had turned up – twenty of them my mates.

  All of this got to me, Steve and Bernard, too, of course, but Ian had it worse than we did. Probably because we all lived with our parents but he was married, so maybe the group felt more like real life for him somehow, more like something he had to make work.

  Or perhaps I’m talking out my arse. Maybe Ian was just kicking glass because he was pissed and felt like it. Not that it mattered anyway: the bouncer didn’t care whether Ian was developing his stage persona or acting out his career frustration or what. He just saw a twat kicking broken glass. He stormed over, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, marched him to the door and threw him out.

  Great. Someone came and told us; so, instead of going on, the three of us had to go to the door and beg the bouncer to let him back in.

  He was going, ‘Fuck off, he’s a wanker kicking broken glass round . . .’ and we were going, ‘Yeah, but that wanker’s our singer, mate – he’s the singer of our band – you’ve got to let him in. Come on, mate . . .’

  Eventually, and after much begging, the bouncer relented and let Ian back in, and at last we got on stage, about twenty minutes late, looked out into the crowd – if you can call it that – and there were all my mates right at the front going, like, ‘Hiya, Hooky. Are you all right, Hooky?’ grinning at me and giving me the thumbs-up. I was thinking that it was nice of them to turn up, but the grinning and thumbs-upping I could have done without. In Joy Division we were very serious. We were more into scowling.

  Meanwhile Barney was giving me daggers, like, ‘Your mates better behave themselves.’ Ian as well, the cheeky bastards.

  Then Ian went, ‘Right, we’re here now. We’re Joy Division and this is . . . “‘Exercise One’”,’ and I struck a pose with my brand-new Hondo II and hit the first note of the first song, an open E.

  Except that instead of the first note of ‘Exercise One’ there was a massive boing sound, and everyone looked at me.

  Oh, fuck. The string had flipped off the guitar. I pushed it back over the nut so it clicked into the hole and hit it again.

  Boing.

  It jumped out again.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck-a-duck.

  It was a fault on the guitar, honest. I had to hold the string in with my thumb and my finger as I was playing. I was just getting to the point of mastering that when I looked down and saw Alex Parker, who was a very good friend of mine, and his brother Ian all of a sudden start fighting.

  No worries, I thought. The rest of them’ll sort that out. Sure enough, a load more of the Flemish Weaver mob waded in to split them up. But then more punches were thrown, one of them went crashing to the floor and instead of the fight stopping it got worse, gradually escalating until all of my mates were involved, a huge mass punch-up. Like a giant ball of them rolling up and down in front of us as we were playing. Oh my God! The rest of the band were looking at them and then at me and giving me daggers as this big ball of fighting blokes rolled across the front of us and then back again. Of course the bouncer who’d thrown Ian out was nowhere to be seen, and they were just left to roll about, so we just kept on playing. Flat as fuck but the band played on.

  But then it escalated. These other kids kept running forward from the back, starting on my mates, lashing out at them as they rolled past. Which of course wound me up. So I started kicking these kids from the stage.

  ‘Don’t fucking kick my mate, y’bastard!’

  ‘Hey, la, pack it in!’

  ‘Bleedin’ Scousers!’

  So there I was, kicking them in the head, trying to play ‘Exercise One’ while trying to hold my string in, the rest of the band really pissed off with me for bringing along my daft scally mates. Shit!

  At last the bouncer reappeared. He had a bunch of mates with him and they started knocking heads together, kicked out the Flemish Weaver lot and then the Scousers, which left us finishing the gig to an empty room, me holding my string, Ian, Barney and Steve all looking at me like they wanted to throttle me. It was terrible, absolutely fucking awful. Our first gig as Joy Division and we didn’t play another one for almost two months, which back then seemed like a long, long time. Definitely the worst thing in the world.

  Like I say. Little did we know, eh?

  PART ONE

  ‘Insight’

  ‘For seventeen days that’s all we had: chicken and chips’

  I was born at about four o’clock in the afternoon at Hope Hospital, Salford on13 February 1956 – and no, not Friday the thirteenth; it was a Monday.

  Mum: Irene Acton. She was stubborn, obstinate, had a will of iron. A typical Northern mum, in other words. Dad: John (Jack) Woodhead. He was a driver for Frederick Hampson Glassworks in Salford, whose building was one of the few left standing when the council demolished Salford and rebuilt it from scratch in the seventies. I still drive past it all the time.

  My first memory is of being in a pram on the pier at Blackpool with someone feeding me chips; I think it was my Auntie Jean. Not long after that my mum and dad split up and got divorced, the paperwork citing ‘cruelty to the petitioner’ – my mother. He was beating her up, of course. It was standard Salford practice for men to get pissed and knock their wives about in those days. But the final straw was when he started seeing this other woman. My mum hated him for that. She hated him till the day she died. Even though she met Bill, married him and was with him for forty years – forty years – she hated my father’s guts, even after he died. Wouldn’t hear his name mentioned. That’s the kind of woman she was.

  After they split up, me, Mum and my younger brother, Chris, went to live with our gran; and, once my mum finished paying for the front-room carpet in the old house because she couldn’t trust Jack to pay (she didn’t want the money-lenders to think she was unreliable – she was very proud), we were for a while a pretty normal single-parent working-class family: two-up, two-down, outside toilet, coal hole, living in Jane Street, Langworthy, in wonderful, dirty old Salford. When I saw Control, all those years later, I didn’t even notice it was in black and white because it was exactly what my childhood had looked and felt like: dark and smoggy and brown, the colour of a wet cardboard box, which was how all of Manchester looked in those days.

  There was nothing to do for us kids, apart from mooch around kicking a tin or poking a lolly stick into a bit of hot tar. The whole of Salford was our playground: we were let out in the morning and told to be back for tea. I remember getting lost and being brought home by the coppers a couple of times. The first time we seemed to have toys was the Christmas Bill came along, when I would have been five. He was courting my mum so of course he inundated me and our Chris with gifts. I remember coming down on Christmas morning, and the presents – I’d never seen anything like it in my life: he’d bought me and our kid a pedal car each and loads more besides. He spoilt us rotten that Christmas, for the first and last time. After that it was back to an orange and a few nuts.

  Bill was Ernest William Hook. I thought he was single when he met my mum but I found out years later that he’d been married before and had kids, two daughters, of his own. I only found out one afternoon after a match: United, of course. I used to get a programme then take it to Bill’s dad, Granddad Hook, a lovely old bloke who used to have a second-hand clothes stall on Salford Market with his wife. She’d died and he now lived on the Precinct after the slum clearance. There was a picture of two young girls on his sideboard. Innocently I asked . . .

  ‘Who are they, Granddad?’

  ‘Your dad’s other family,’ he replied. It still seems strange they were never mentioned.

  In the beginning, when he was courting my mum, Bill was really nice. Me and our kid once poured a cup of tea in his petrol tank one afternoon (jealous, I suppose, because we were used to having Mum to ourselves) and he didn’t even batter us!
Just told us off. But over the years his hidden/ignored family made more sense, because he soon became a bit of a misery. He could be a real horrible fucker sometimes, especially at Christmas. His catchphrase used to be, ‘If I’m suffering we’re all suffering’ – and he meant it. I still use it now to wind my kids up.

  His saving grace was his money, I suppose. He was a highly skilled glass fitter. You know those machines they use for blowing glass, to make bottles and jars and all that? His job was to fix them and he went all over the world to do it: Singapore, India, the Caribbean – he was a proper seasoned traveller and the only guy on our street with a car, a 2.5 Riley RMB four-door that me and our kid put the tea in. He got us a telly, too, which again was the only one on our street. People used to queue up to watch it; we were suddenly popular. That’s another of my earliest memories: me and Chris, after we’d been put to bed, creeping out and sitting at the top of the stairs listening to Coronation Street.