Peter Hook - Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

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.

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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

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Dedicated, with love, to my mother Irene
and her sister, Jean.

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

Peter Hook, 2012

Its a strange life. Normally I dont 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: Whats the point of all this?

So, answers on a postcard, please.

Hooky
X

January 1978

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

Not our first gig. Before that wed been called Warsaw but, for reasons Ill explain later, we couldnt carry on being called Warsaw so wed 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. Were not fucking Nazis. Were 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 Id been out and bought a brand-new guitar.

Id 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 didnt know what that meant but it sounded serious. So Id 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, well 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 Im 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 wed 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 werent 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 werent 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 Im 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 didnt 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, hes a wanker kicking broken glass round... and we were going, Yeah, but that wankers our singer, mate hes the singer of our band youve 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, were here now. Were 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.