Touching from a Distance Read online

  Morley’s observations about Warsaw were accurate. It was true many of the early Warsaw songs were a little lame. It was not until they had gained a small amount of recognition and publicity that they were able to begin to progress towards perfection. Had they taken the stage during the punk era to perform any of the classic tracks from Closer, they would have failed in their mission.

  Scouring the music papers became an almost full-time occupation for Ian and they began to pile up in the bedroom. Suddenly it became very easy for anyone at all who had a band in the North to get a mention in the music press. Warsaw were an incomplete band. Drummers came and drummers went, each with their own particular problems. Terry Mason’s attempts to learn to drum were unproductive and he was ‘promoted’ to manager; Tony Tabac was easy-going but outmoded and unreliable; then there was Steve Brotherdale. He was the drummer for the Panik who were being managed by Rob Gretton, DJ at Rafters disco, Manchester, and editor of the Slaughter and the Dogs fanzine. Steve seemed hyperactive – his eyes appeared to be everywhere but on the person he was talking to and he soon earned himself the nickname of Steve ‘Big Mouth’. On 10 August 1977, he‚ his wife Gill and another member of the Panik came to my sister’s eighteenth birthday party at the White Hart, armed with a chocolate cake laced with laxatives. They had the mistaken idea that it would be hilarious if the rest of the guests suffered from diarrhoea, but their main objective was to persuade Ian to leave Warsaw and join the Panik. We continued the discussion back at the house in Barton Street, but by then we had all over-indulged and were tired. It was obvious Steve had realized that there was no way Ian would make a move to any other band, but for a while he still kept hacking away.

  Later that night I had my first taste of things to come when one of our neighbours took off her clothes and engaged Ian in a snogging session – not that Ian objected. It was just about daylight, so I flounced out of the house intending to walk to my parents’ house. By the time I reached the Flowerpot at the junction with Park Lane and Oxford Road, Ian had caught up with me. He grabbed hold of my arm and tried to take me home while I held on to a nearby gatepost. The roads were deserted apart from one young lad walking in the opposite direction. He paused and looked at us for a while, as if he was contemplating helping me, but Ian screamed at him: ‘It’s OK, she’s my wife!’

  Although Steve Brotherdale was an excellent drummer, the power and aggression which initially got him into Warsaw became his downfall. The other members of the band found it impossible to work with such a personality. When he got out of the car to investigate a supposed flat tyre, they simply drove off and left him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SOMETHING MUST BREAK

  As Warsaw became more popular they were offered more gigs, especially at Rafters, so there was an urgent need to find a good and permanent drummer. Ian placed an advertisement in Jones’ Music Store in Macclesfield in what seemed an unlikely attempt art finding someone who would be worthy of the position. The only reply came from Steve Morris, a former King’s School pupil who had been expelled while Ian was there. He very conveniently lived ten minutes walk away from us. He already knew of Warsaw after reading a gig review in the punk fanzine Shytalk. Steve was surprised to see an advertisement for what he thought was a punk band in a back-water town such as Macclesfield.

  Barney, Hooky and Ian were delighted with him – like the missing piece of the Warsaw jigsaw he fitted in perfectly. Warsaw became a complete ‘family’.

  I was happy for Ian, too. Having a member of the band who lived nearby was advantageous for him and, moreover, it provided him with a companionship he had missed since losing touch with Tony Nuttall and Oliver Cleaver. We hadn’t socialized in Macclesfield for some time, but now we were able to meet Steve and his girlfriend Stephanie and visit our old haunts.

  Luckily for me, Ian used his knowledge of the Manpower Services Commission and the following September I began a TOPS course at the local college, learning shorthand and typing. Life began to improve during this time and we were very contented together. I was enjoying my college course and the Giro they gave me every week. Ian was still working for the Civil Service and he applied for a transfer from the Manpower Services Commission in Manchester to a job nearer home. There could not have been anywhere nearer than the position he was given – the Employment Exchange in Macclesfield. This was a real break as it enabled him literally to roll out of bed and straight to his desk only a hundred yards away on South Park Road. It was ideal for someone like Ian, who detested getting up in the morning. He found himself with a more responsible job which he thoroughly enjoyed. As Assistant Disablement Resettlement Officer, he worked closely with disabled people to ensure that they claimed the benefits to which they were entitled. He took an extremely personal interest in his clients and did his utmost to find employment for them. The job certainly highlighted the caring side of his personality.

  Ian’s mentor at that time was his superior, Ernest Beard. Although Ernest was a good deal older than Ian, they had quite a lot in common. Ian knew him as Ernie and spoke of him with affection and respect. They became good friends through the work they shared. Both were equally frustrated by the local firms that refused to employ disabled people and, later, Ian was to spend some time persuading Tony Wilson to spearhead a television campaign to help epileptics in particular.

  The Department sent Ian on a course to learn about epilepsy. Once brought under control, this complex condition usually has no effect on a person’s working life, but ancient prejudices are difficult to eradicate and employers are reluctant to take epileptics on in any capacity. Ian liked to talk about what he had learned and soon I felt as if I knew almost as much about the illness as he did.

  On the weekend of 2 October 1977 the Electric Circus opened its doors for what was supposed to be the last time, but wasn’t. The old cinema stood out on the flattened landscape. As we neared the building, Ian became visibly agitated. Even if only one band was going to play, it was going to be his. (In fact Ian didn’t get his wish and Warsaw played on the Sunday night.)

  Inside, the building smelled damp, and the polystyrene tiles at the back of the stage were rollered with black paint which gave the Circus ‘ring’ a homely, amateurish appearance. Warsaw’s performance was rewarded with a place on the Virgin ten-inch album Short Circuit which comprised eight tracks, all recorded live over that final weekend. This was a dubious honour as Warsaw’s name-change to Joy Division was imminent and the chosen track was not one of their best. Most people remember it purely for Ian’s outburst about Rudolf Hess. However, the album captured the atmosphere of the time by including such diverse and intrinsically Mancunian bands as the Fall, the Drones, Steel Pulse, the Buzzcocks and Mancunian poet John Cooper Clarke. Paul Morley’s dialogue on the inner sleeve eloquently sets the scene and by the time the needle hits the blue (if you were lucky) or black vinyl, you can almost smell the substances.

  Although Ian was happy then, the other members of the band still regarded him as ‘pretty mad’ because of the peaks and troughs in his personality:

  ‘It was this contrast of being nice and polite, and then totally manic when he was on stage. One night, during a performance at Rafters, he ripped the whole stage apart, pulling off these twelve-inch-square wooden tiles with nails in them and throwing them at the audience. Then he dropped a pint pot on the stage, it smashed and he rolled around in the broken glass, cutting a ten-inch gash in his thigh.’

  Peter Hook

  Ian was often frustrated as he felt that fame for his band couldn’t come fast enough. Bernard Sumner worked at Cosgrove Hall, who specialize in animation and TV commercials. He had started at the bottom and at the time was doing a great deal of tea-making. It was Ian’s opinion that Bernard should break all barriers and pester every passing Granada TV executive until Warsaw were given a spot on someone’s show. When this didn’t happen, Ian called Bernard every name under the sun but only really showed his exasperation at home. Ian’s belief in what he was doing wa
s ferocious and he failed to understand Bernard’s reasonable timidity. He remembers, ‘I didn’t even work for Granada in the first place. It was just an impractical bee in his bonnet about it. To be fair he was trying really hard to get us on television. He used to plague Tony Wilson and eventually he did do it.’

  Ian persuaded our bank manager that we needed a loan to buy dining-room furniture, and so we were able to raise £400 towards the recording and pressing of what was to be the first Joy Division record – an EP called An Ideal for Living. The loan was taken from our joint bank account and the rest of the band paid us their share in instalments. I did raise a fleeting objection to sharing the financial responsibility of investing in the band, but after consideration, Ian’s plan seemed the only way forward. He told me that his parents had refused to lend him the money and we had already borrowed from my parents to buy a new lounge carpet. T. J. Davidson owned the empty warehouse in Manchester where they and other bands, including Sad Café, rehearsed. An attempt was made to bring T. J. Davidson in on the deal to help with the finance, but he was reluctant to become their manager. Peter Hook believed that TJ neither liked nor understood the music.

  Joy Division’s debut release was recorded at Pennine Sound Studio, Oldham, in December 1977. Paul Morley offered to go with them as their producer, but fortunately (or not) a hangover prevented him from being in the right place at the right time! However, his relationship with them as part of the music press grew. He found them incredibly shy. At the first real interview they sat around a table for two hours barely uttering a word. Transcription of the interview proved difficult and so Morley pretended in his writing that Joy Division knew exactly what they were doing and held their silence as some kind of artistic statement. Joy Division’s stage presence, the power they held, had nothing in common with the timid, giggling boys who would stand at the bar.

  An Ideal for Living turned out to be very much an in-house project: Bernard designed the sleeve and Steve arranged the printing in Macclesfield. The sleeve was in fact a poster which, when folded into four, was just large enough to slide a seven-inch pressing between the pages. The poster itself depicted a member of the Hitler Youth Movement banging a drum, a German soldier pointing a gun at a small boy with his arms raised, and two photographs of the band members. In one of the photographs, Bernard manages to look like a member of the Hitler Youth himself, while Peter Hook with his boots and moustache resembles an off-duty squaddie. Within the details of the instruments, one vowel in each word is treated to an umlaut to complete the Germanic theme. We all met at Steve’s parents’ house to fold the posters and used plastic sandwich bags to stop the records falling out. The image on the sleeve fuelled more speculation about the name of the band and led to questions about Joy Division’s political affiliations. However, the tracks quickly became outdated as Joy Division could barely keep up with their own speedy development. They had difficulty distributing the disc on their own and eventually sold them to Rabid Records.

  The four lads probably played their last gig as Warsaw on New Year’s Eve 1977 at the Swinging Apple in Liverpool. The club was the size of a back-to-back terraced house. By the time the band had set up, the venue had the atmosphere of a small youth club. At first the few people there stood politely in front of the stage, but when manners turned to disappointment, they all sat down on the floor with their backs against the wall. In desperation Warsaw launched into a cover of Iggy Pop’s ‘The Passenger’ and the audience stood up again. The highlight of the evening was midnight – not just because it was New Year’s Eve, but because in true Liverpudlian tradition everybody ran out into the street to welcome the New Year in. The Manchester lads seemed puzzled by the bonhomie.

  The release of the EP in January marked the change of name from Warsaw to Joy Division after the disappointing news that there was already a London-based band called Warsaw Pakt. The essential ingredient for any band at that time was to have a supposedly shocking name. Names such as Slaughter and the Dogs and Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds were guaranteed to conjure up the image of a group who just might resemble the Sex Pistols. Most young hopefuls completely missed the sad fact that all they could ever be were pale imitations jumping on the inevitable band(!)-wagon. Ian told me that Joy Division was what the Nazis called female prisoners kept alive to be used as prostitutes for the German Army. I cringed. It was gruesome and tasteless and I hoped that the majority of people would not know what it meant. I wondered if the members of the band were intending to glorify the degradation of women. Telling myself that they had chosen it merely to gain attention, I gradually became accustomed to the provocative moniker and concentrated on the music.

  Joy Division worked hard to produce a new, tighter image. The frantic punk-style songs disappeared and were replaced with strong melodies and lyrics worthy of closer inspection.

  The band played their first gig as Joy Division on 25 January 1978 at Pips disco in Manchester. Tony Wilson had promised Steve Morris that he would come to see them, but he didn’t make an appearance. They performed what seemed to me to be a very brief set to an audience which had at last latched on to Joy Division’s special aura. I sat at the top of the steps above the dance floor and observed a fan as he ran across the front of the stage and quickly picked up a discarded set list written in Ian’s giant scrawl. It amused me that someone wanted to collect the set list when the band had only been paid £60.

  The balancing act between Ian’s day job and gigging had begun. Ian went to the doctor because he had flu symptoms but came away with only painkillers. The following week he was so tired after playing until 2 a.m. that he tried to get a sick note in order to skive off. This time the doctor examined him and told him that he really was ill.

  Living in Macclesfield again was almost as daunting as moving to a new town as most of our contemporaries had flown south. Sometimes if there was an antiques fair at the Drill Hall, we would browse around and perhaps meet up with John Talbot, who usually managed a stall. Kelvin Briggs was also still a very good friend, but we didn’t have the fun we’d had when we were younger. Although Ian and I were happy together, it miffed me slightly that when the other girls at college held parties, Ian would never come.

  One contact with the past came when Tony Nuttall called on us. This visit was marked by one of our neighbours calling the police because Ian and Tony had been seen walking over the roofs of the cars on Barton Street on their way back from the Chinese take-away. Apart from this, Tony and Ian had grown a long way apart, particularly in their politics. They were left and right wing respectively. Tony wasn’t a passionate campaigner, but found that shared politics gave him an almost unconscious way of warming to people. His friendship with Ian had disappeared and he wondered if Ian also felt the gulf. For this reason, the conversation that day remained shallow as they sought some common ground. When Ian showed Tony Nuttall the An Ideal for Living sleeve, he was dismayed by the imagery and, listening to the music, found it wasn’t really to his taste either. Their friendship never re-established itself.

  *

  I had bought my first car, a Morris Traveller, with a £160 tax rebate and passed my driving test in January 1978. Ian was pleased for me but it did nothing to encourage him to learn to drive, despite my nagging about how much he was missing by being a mere passenger. However, for me the car was an important symbol of my independence. Ian was happy to be driven around by Steve, but I revelled in being able to make my own decisions about which gigs I attended.

  Unfortunately, I hadn’t realized that Ian had no interest in learning anything practical at all. I had also assumed that just as I learned to cook as I went along, Ian would gradually pick up on the traditional male skills. Having a father who did everything for me, including heeling my shoes, gave me expectations that Ian simply could not live up to. Ian had always claimed to be ambidextrous – he told me that he had in fact been born left-handed and that his mother had forced him to write with his right hand when he was a child. But if this means he was equal
ly capable with both hands then it would also mean he was equally incapable with both hands. Ian was often frustrated and embarrassed by his clumsiness.

  As the musical rebellion against the power of the London labels grew, Ian’s excitement was obvious. Of the Manchester Musicians’ Collective Ian said,

  ‘The Collective was a really good thing for Joy Division. It gave us somewhere to play, we met other musicians, talked, swapped ideas. Also it gave us a chance to experiment in front of people. We were allowed to take risks – the Collective isn’t about music that needs to draw an audience.’

  The reasons for Ian’s absence from his Manchester job became apparent when I realized that more often than not he had taken time off to visit Derek Brandwood and his assistant, Northern Soul DJ, Richard Searling. They ran an RCA promotion department in Piccadilly Plaza, Manchester. Derek Brandwood had managed to acquire a display window in the ground-floor avenue which Ian and I passed every day, but apart from the display window, the office was unobtrusive and well hidden from the rest of the bustling city. It had become a meeting place for new talent in the city and, coincidentally, for Martin Hannett. It was Martin’s suggestion that he and Derek work with Sad Café as a team and he told Derek that he would be able to get them a TV spot on Granada if Derek could arrange an interview with Iggy Pop for Tony Wilson. It was this that set the ball rolling as far as talent-scouting in the North-West was concerned.