Joy Division Page #2

that it was not dicey.

Can't buy everything, that's true

Only one thing wrong with that

What it don't buy I don't use

Some guy at work gave me a couple of books.

One was called House of Dolls,

and I knew it was about the Nazis,

but I didn't read it.

And I just flipped through the pages.

It was the brothel that soldiers went to.

And I thought,

"Well, it's pretty bad taste,

but it's quite punk."

And everyone I told the name to went,

"That's a great name."

It sounds too neat and tidy,

but it almost seems to be

that it all came when they had the name.

It was like Roxy Music or Velvet Underground.

You know, you knew instantly

from the moment it happened,

it was one of those names.

At that stage,

when we made our first record,

An Ideal for Living,

we just were making this music,

and we wanted people to hear it.

And it was very much punk ethos

of do-it-yourself, independence.

Forget big labels,

just small, you know, cottage industries.

I'd actually forgotten

that Ian borrowed the money.

God, if I did it now,

my wife would kill me.

So how he got away with it then

is unbelievable, you know.

So we banged it down, heard it in the studio.

We thought it sounded great.

A couple of weeks later, we got the vinyl.

You know, Ideal For Living,

I draw on the sleeve.

"All right, I know what we'll do.

We'll take it to Pip's,

a local club that we go."

Went to the deejay...

"Hey, mate, play our record.

It's us, you know, us."

This guy's like,

"No, f*** off."

"No, no, come on, come on.

It's us.

We've been coming in for years, bloke."

So those people on the dance floor...

he puts it on, and they listen to it.

And the pressing was so bad,

it was, like, completely muffled...

so quiet, you wouldn't believe it.

And it just cleared the dance floor.

Everyone...

Everyone just walks off,

and he took it off halfway through.

We were like,

"Oh, sh*t. What have we done?"

We didn't play for six months.

We couldn't get a gig.

Nobody would give us a gig as Joy Division.

It was really difficult.

I think they thought we were yobs,

which we were.

He spurred us on

to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse,

and write and write and write,

and get really, really tight,

so that when we did get a gig

we would show the bastards.

We used to rehearse twice a week.

And in those three and two hours,

we'd invariably get a song.

One.

We had an enormous factory floor to ourselves.

In the winter,

we used to just brush all the rubbish

to one end of the room

and set fire to it to just keep warm.

We were all on our own island,

what we're doing,

and we just really made sure

that what we were doing sounded great.

So I didn't pay attention

to what the others were doing.

When I played low,

I couldn't hear anything.

I saw when I played high,

I could pick it out,

because of the row ,

because Barney's amp was really loud.

Then Ian just latched onto you playing high,

and he'd say,

"That sounds good when you play high."

Barney plays guitar.

"We should work on that.

That sounds really distinctive."

Just a happy accident like that

gave us our sound, you know.

Ian always had a box of words,

and we just pulled some words out

and started singing them,

so we already had them, really,

because he would be at home

writing every night anyway.

They had, like,

a "Battle of the Bands" night

for young bands that were just starting out.

I remember Paul Morley being there in a band.

Kevin Cummins was in his band,

I think Richard Boon was in it.

It was like a joke band,

you know, having a laugh.

Everybody, including Joy Division,

turned out to be...

to be, you know, to win.

You know, like, some weird prototype X Factor.

This is when I first saw the other side of Ian.

Ian was a really lovely,

really nice, polite, intelligent guy.

If he didn't get what he wanted

through being like that,

he would explode into this kind of frenzied...

Grr!...

You know, frenzied thing.

Because that's the only way

he could get what he wanted.

I remember him kicking the door down

to their dressing room,

and going to Paul Morley and Kevin Cummins,

them going,

"You're not f***ing going on.

You're not f***ing going on.

We'll kill you.

If you go on, we'll bowl you.

We're going on."

Ian had previously gone up earlier in the night

to Tony Wilson to complain.

Called him a c*nt, you know.

He says, "C*nt you."

Tony was like,

"Why, why, why, darling?

What have I done, darling?"

He'd be like,

"Well, you won't put us on your..."

Tony had a TV program then.

I didn't answer him,

but I know I remember thinking, you know,

"You're next on the list, you f***ing idiot."

I spend a lot of my days working out

how I could possibly explain to people

how bizarre this is,

that this man would suddenly come to be involved.

Tony Wilson reports.

The Southwark, Lambeth,

and Lewisham Area Health Authority

is the largest single health authority

in the country.

Welcome to the circus...

Whew!

It was like seeing an alien

with tentacles and eight eyes,

really, when I first met Tony Wilson.

He was just like from another planet.

He was a show-biz one, you know.

He was a star.

Tony had So it Goes,

one of the only platforms

that championed punk and the New Wave.

And that was wonderful.

And strangely,

it championed within the establishment.

I mean, there's nothing more establishment,

particularly to young people, than television.

Every other band that night at Rafters was on stage

because they wanted to be on stage.

They wanted to be rock stars.

They wanted to be in the music business.

But this lot were on stage

because they had no f***ing choice.

The next day,

I remember being in a phone booth

in Spring Gardens in Manchester,

just outside the Post Office there.

There was a knock on the booth.

I opened the door. "Yeah?"

This guy stood there.

It was Rob Gretton.

I knew Rob Gretton because he was one

of the other deejays at Rafters.

I just have this picture in my mind,

I can still see of him ranting at me ecstatically

about how wonderful he thought they were

and weren't they the best band

you'd ever seen in your life?

And he was going to manage them,

and he was going to take them

to all sorts of places you wouldn't believe.

One of the first things

that Rob Gretton did when he came along,

was "Stop the f***ing record that you've done."

He says,

"Get rid of that f***ing cover.

Everyone thinks you're nuts just because of it.

Get rid of that f***ing cover.

Whose idea was that?"

And he tossed it, you know.

"So we're going to do a new cover,

and we're going to press it

as a 12-inch so it sounds loud."

So he did it, and we played it,

and then it was like,

"Wow, he was right, yeah,

it sounds fantastic."

No, no love lost

No, no love lost

When he was deejaying,

he was playing soul music, I think.

But his ideology was really punk.

We'd met a guy called Richard Searling

from RCA Records.

Ian was a regular visitor to the RCA offices.

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