Stephen Morris - Record Play Pause: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist: The Joy Division Years

RECORD PLAY PAUSE

Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist

Volume I

STEPHEN MORRIS

CONSTABLE

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Constable

Copyright Stephen Morris, 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-47212-619-1

Constable

An imprint of

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk

To my darling wife, my beautiful daughters and the memory of my parents

CONTENTS

It must be about four in the morning by now, still dark anyway. I cant make out the red glow of the digital readout on the clock. Im not awake by choice.

Perhaps its jet lag. Twelve hours in the air flying east across nine time zones is enough to confuse anybody. Youd think Id be used to that by now. Over thirty years in the racket is surely long enough to have grasped the basics.

The sushi supper blowout cant have helped. But you cant come to Tokyo and not overindulge in raw fish and wasabi at the earliest opportunity. Sashimi in the hotels highly elaborate wood-panelled traditional tatami dining room, starkly contrasting with the hi-tech neon glow flickering on the other side of the darkened glass. Close your eyes and you could almost forget you were on the fifty-second floor. Almost.

It could be that stopping my sleep. Vertigo. Height makes my head spin and my knees go wobbly. I can feel myself begin to plummet.

The Park Hyatt offers beautiful views of Mount Fuji or Shinjuku, the itinerary says.

It also says were playing at the Fuji Rock Festival in a couple of days. So not here for that long.

Maybe its this room. Its a smart, modern hotel room in a chic expensive hotel with an extremely well-stocked minibar three different flavours of designer crisps and two jars of sophisticated-looking nuts three buttons to open and close the curtains and a range of fiddly mood lightings. The current setting is PITCH BLACK with a bit of a dim glow from the bathroom. It took quite a bit of trial and error to get it just right.

But neither the complicated lack of lighting or the lovely crisp white sheets are doing their trick tonight. Which is very unusual: out like a light anywhere in the world is the normal course of events.

OK, best thing to do would be think of something else other than sleep, that usually works. Put your mind somewhere else and see what pops in. Dreams hopefully.

Right, here we go.

How did I get here? Thats always a good question. Think of that, take your mind off it. Try and forget they have the odd earthquake here.

* * *

Best go back, all the way back, see what you can drag into the present.

Whats the first thing you can remember? Your first real memory?

Go on, try it its a good game. Fun for all.

This object in the fields mystified the young me. Was it a witchs altar or a beacon for flying saucers?

A sunny day. White, very bright white light. I think Im lying in a pram looking up through a fine net at the sky. Ive just woken up. Theres a butterfly bumping into the net and fluttering about on it, maybe its stuck, flapping about. Huge and very scary. It seems like it wants to attack me.

Im in the garden at the back of my parents house on Gawsworth Road in Macclesfield. A house bordered by green fields, a quiet road and a bus stop.

I dont like this butterfly. I want it to go away, I want to get out and get away from it. I cant, so I start crying loudly.

Later. Not sure how much later more than a couple of years.

Waking one rainy spring morning. The dark grey clouds are low in the sky. Must have been pouring all night.

Outside theres a commotion.

A cacophony.

Peeping over the ledge of the bedroom window, I see a herd of cows right outside. Too close. I run downstairs and there are cows outside the kitchen window too.

The house is surrounded by big black-and-white bellowing cows. Theyve broken down a fence and escaped, they want to explore. The big back lawn is a flooded mess of mud and cow shit. I cant understand how this has happened.

Cows are supposed to be nice docile things. This lot look angry.

Gawsworth Road, Macclesfield.

Thats the place, our back garden. Thats me on the right, recumbent, sulking always reluctant to have my picture taken, even then. It was a Sunday morning when Mum took that snap with her Kodak. Thats my Sunday face.

We are on our way to church, Amanda and me. Thats Amanda on the left. Shes my three-years-younger sister.

We are waiting to be dragged off by our Auntie Elsie to the harvest festival at St Andrews Church. This was where, I was told, you took things to be distributed among the poor and needy.

Thats a basket of things, tins of fruit (tinned pears, at a guess) and such, that I will later very reluctantly pass on to the poor and needy. You can tell my hearts not really in it from the picture, cant you? What a slob.

I had a bit of a strop on that day. Sundays always used to put me in a bad mood. Being dragged off to church when I could be doing something much more interesting was bound to be a bit of downer, wasnt it? Well, Sundays were always like that. I remember that basket was bloody heavy even without the tin opener, which I thought would have been a useful addition to its contents.

On the bench under the basket of bounty there is a small rusty metal plaque with a few lines from D. F. Gurney on it:

The kiss of the sun for pardon, The song of the birds for mirth, One is nearer Gods heart in a garden Than anywhere else on earth.

I dont know why but I thought that God himself had made that wooden bench. I once tried carving my initials in it with an amber-handled screwdriver.

Thatd teach God.

See that worn-down, muddy bit of grass above the step? Its at the exact spot where I realised I could ride a bike one minute I was falling over and the next I was off pedalling furiously down the lawn. That was it. A boy on a bike spelt freedom. I was off down the road all the way to the bus stop and then the paper shop on the Weston Estate; next stop the Big City. Or at least the not-so-bright lights of Macclesfield. But first Id have to pass the Cycling Proficiency Test. Qualifications always get in the way. I didnt want to get into trouble with the two coppers who lived across the way. Theyd stopped my friend Geoff from up the road and warned him about riding without lights and a bell. The reckless lives we lived on Gawsworth Road, in Macclesfield.

The area had been a rural idyll around the 1920s just a few houses surrounded by acres of pasture.

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