Unknown Pleasures

Inside Joy Division

Peter Hook

• Publisher: It Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780062222572
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062222589
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

In Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, Peter Hook, bassist for the legendary, groundbreaking band Joy Division, takes readers backstage with the group that helped define the sound of a generation and influenced artists such as U2, Radiohead, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Unlike other books about Joy Division, Factory Records, or lead singer Ian Curtis—who took his own life just before the band's first U.S. Tour— Unknown Pleasures tells Joy Division's story from the unique perspective of one of the three surviving band members.

Told with surprising humor and vivid detail, Unknown Pleasures is the book Joy Division fans have been waiting for.

Part One

“Insight”

Chapter 1

“Oh, fuck, it’s Steve Harley”

I’d started getting interested in pop music around twelve or thirteen, when, like every other kid back in those days, I was glued to Top of the Pops every week. Then somebody gave me a reel-to-reel tape recorder that already had a load of music on it, and I used to listen to that over and over again—stuff like “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.” Still, though, nothing could eclipse Top of the Pops, which I lived for. You forget now, what with MTV, YouTube, and the fact that music’s shoveled into your ears in every shop, restaurant, and supermarket, but back then Top of the Pops was the only way you could get to see pop music being performed. For a kid from Salford it was mind-blowing to see Deep Purple doing “Black Night,” Sabbath ripping through “Paranoid,” Family doing “The Weavers Answer,” Marc Bolan, Bowie . . . It was like having a window on a wonderful other world, even if they were lip syncing. Plus it annoyed your parents.

As I got older I became a skinhead. This was way before skinheads were associated with the National Front. Back then it meant being into ska and reggae, ironically enough, and from that I discovered the Upsetters, the Pioneers, Desmond Dekker, Dave & Ansel Collins. It wasn’t until the fourth year that I got my first record player, though, when I bought one from Martin Gresty, who needed some quick cash. I don’t think his mum even knew he was selling her Dansette, to be honest, but I gave him eleven quid for it, which was all the money I had and a fortune in those days. Of course that meant I couldn’t afford to buy any records, which my mother thought was hilarious. So I nicked some. There was a shop on Langworthy Road that used to have old ex-jukebox singles for sale in a box outside and I swiped a couple sight-unseen, just to have something to play on my Dansette. When I got round the corner to take a look at my haul I wasn’t exactly overjoyed: “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” by Kenny Rogers and “The Green Manalishi” by Fleetwood Mac. I’d never heard of either. Still, at least I finally had something to listen to. Or so I thought. Turned out I couldn’t play them—since they were for a jukebox they needed an adaptor—and it took me another week to steal one! Years later I appeared on that BBC program The One Show, talking about the first record I ever bought: I told them it was “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town”; I didn’t tell them that I’d nicked it, though.

But when I really got into music—when the bug didn’t so much bite as take a huge fuck-off chunk out of my leg—was on holiday in Rhyl. This was just before I left the Town Hall for Butlin’s (a popular British holiday camp): 1973, it would have been. There was me and my mates: Deano, Stuart Houghton, Danny Lee, and Greg Wood, five of us in a four-berth caravan. Christ it was freezing, and there was no electricity—there were gas mantles for lights—but it was the first proper holiday I’d ever had, and we spent it roaming the streets of Rhyl and listening to Radio Luxembourg in the caravan. They kept playing a song called “Sebastian” by Cockney Rebel. That was it for me. For the first time, I listened to a record and really thought, Wow. Why, I don’t know. Because it was different, I suppose; it seemed so different. It had a slow, orchestral start and built to a climax—it was very long, too, which was something unheard of for a pop record back then. It just grabbed me—grabbed my attention and held it. Strange how we’d be doing another very long song with “Blue Monday” years later.

When I got back from holiday I bought the single. It was nine minutes long and you had to turn the record over halfway through, which just added to the experience: it was part of the ritual of playing it, gave the song a dramatic pause and made me like the record even more. After that I became a fan of Cockney Rebel and bought their first LP, The Human Menagerie—a great record. They became my gateway to music. Before this when I’d watched Top of the Pops I’d just goggled at it, but now it was like I was part of it; I understood it. Bowie, Roxy, Ian Dury—I started to get them now.

Years later I was at an awards ceremony with New Order getting an award for “Blue Monday.” I’d given up drinking by then, so I was straight as an arrow when Steve Harley strolled up to me, and I thought, Oh, fuck, it’s Steve Harley from Cockney Rebel.

He went, “Hello, Peter, how are you?”

And I thought, Not only is it Steve Harley, but he knows who I am and he’s dead fucking nice.

He went, “Oh, it’s so lovely to meet you. I believe that our first record was one of your inspirations?”

I was like, “Yeah, yeah, it was,” and ran away. Just couldn’t deal with it. Left him standing there looking around and no doubt thinking, That was fucking bizarre. But it wasn’t as bizarre for him as it was for me. “Sebastian” had got me into the whole thing. If it hadn’t been for Steve Harley, I wouldn’t have been standing at that awards ceremony talking to Steve Harley. Very, very weird, that was.

After that—Rhyl, I mean, not the awards—I started reading NME and Sounds. Then we began going to gigs with Barney, who I’d met in my first year at Salford Grammar. He still gets really annoyed when I call him Barney.

“You’re the only fucking person who calls me Barney. Everyone else calls me Bernard,” he bleats. But at school they used to call him Barney Rubble—this even cropped up in an early Joy Division review—and his surname was Dickin, so they took the piss out of him about that, too, as you can imagine. He changed it to Sumner after he finished school.

Barney wasn’t in my class, though. He wasn’t even in the same house. I was in Lancaster and he was in Gloucester, the other two being Warwick and York. There were a few lessons we shared, but not many. My first memory of him is standing outside the gym and him coming up, and I just went, “All right?” and he went, “All right?” and that was it; that was the first time we had any kind of contact. No indication that we’d be spending the rest of our lives together, in one way or another, and change the world of music not once but twice. Even then we didn’t really become friends at first, not really until the third year, when we both became skinheads. Both of us had scooters but Barney got his first; they’d changed the driving age from sixteen to seventeen and he lied about his age to get his. My birthday being in February meant I had to wait a year. We were both gradually getting into music: starting with soul and reggae, moving into pop. Barney’s scooter was adorned with stick-on letters spelling “Santana,” his favorite group, and I had “Abraxas” on mine, the name of their second album, and we used to ride around Langworthy Road on our Santana-themed scooters, looking for girls to chat up.

A right pair of right bastards we were, too. Always in trouble. Always stealing things, which we continued to do when we were in bands. We were terrible for nicking things in Joy Division and New Order. We used to go to these wonderful gigs with all this beautiful stuff backstage and nick it all. Now you’ve got bands like the Happy Mondays or Oasis (in the early days) who had big scally reputations, but they had the same background as us: just working-class thieves. You never had anything so you took it. Same attitude to music: you’ve got to start somewhere. The difference was that nobody expected that sort of behavior from us in Joy Division or New Order because we had an arty, intellectual image.

So anyway, we’d started going to gigs and we saw Led Zeppelin; Cockney Rebel, of course; and half of a Deep Purple set before Barney made us leave because he had a toothache. It wasn’t just him who had to leave: it was all of us. He’s always got away with fucking murder, that one.

I first read about the Sex Pistols in April 1976, on another holiday. Me, Stuart Houghton, Danny Lee, and Danny McQueeney decided to go to Torquay and Newquay in my new car, a Mark Ten Jag 420G, registration KFR 666F (funny how I can remember all the numbers)—the same model the Krays had—that I’d bought for £325. We weren’t staying anywhere, just sleeping in the car. Needless to say it was tough but enjoyable; we got on well—it was one of those holidays I’ll never forget. The tires were knackered and we couldn’t go more than fifty miles an hour—took us hours and hours to get there. But one thing I do remember was sitting in a car park in Newquay at about seven in the morning, still pissed from the night before, reading Melody Maker. It had the Sex Pistols in it, and there was a picture of them taken at their gig at the Nashville Rooms where a huge fight had broken out. Sitting there in the car park in Cornwall, with the sun coming up and all my mates snoring in the Jag, I had an epiphany.

First off, I was intrigued by the idea of a group who seemed, I don’t know, human compared to bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, who seemed, to a working-class tosser from Salford, so out of my league they might as well have lived on another planet. I mean, I’d never have looked at Led Zep and thought, I’m going to be the next John Paul Jones. He was like some kind of god up there. I loved the music. I loved watching it. But the idea of emulating them was ludicrous.

The Sex Pistols, though: they looked like working-class tossers too, which automatically made them completely different from anything I’d seen in music before. I was a great fan of James Dean; I’d seen Giant and Rebel Without a Cause. And now I felt a connection between him, these punks, and me. That real snotty, rebellious, arrogant-kid type of thing, only not in glossy-looking 1950s America but in gray old 1970s Britain. The Pistols were the link somehow. And the fact that they had a reputation for fighting at every gig and were part of this movement—this punk movement . . .

I was like, I have got to see this lot.

Timeline One

May 1948–April 1976

MAY 31, 1948

Martin Hannett born, Miles Platting, Manchester.

From an early age Hannett showed an aptitude for mathematics and science, interests he would carry through to his musical theory. Gaining a chemistry degree from Manchester’s UMIST, he played bass for Greasy Bear before forming the Invisible Girls, the backing band for John Cooper Clarke and, in later years, Pauline Murray and Nico. Together with Tosh Ryan he helped set up the musicians’ collective Music Force, then Rabid Records, the home of Slaughter & the Dogs. Styling himself Martin Zero, he went...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue: January 1978
• Part One: “Insight”
• Part Two: “Disorder”
• Part Three: “Transmission”
• Part Four: “Love Will Tear Us Apart”
• Part Five: “Ceremony”
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Peter Hook
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher