2003 01 FAC413, New Order, Jack Magazine

FAC 413

New Order lead Jack through their own stash of rare personal memorabilia in our exclusive FAC catalogue-numbered story

NEW ORDER'S FIRST BASS GUITAR AND EFFECTS PEDAL

Hooky : This was the first bass I'd had. What type of bass is it? Nothing. It's a Nothing Bass. Bernard was so impressed by the Sex Pistols he said, we've got to form a band. He had a guitar so he said, "Go and get a bass". I went down to Mazels’ in Piccadilly, which became Johnny Roadhouse, and said, "I want a bass," and the guy just lifted this off the wall and said, "There you go". It cost 35 quid. Mazels’ was an old-fashioned music shop where you could buy things like valves for old pre-war radios. Steven: I think I bought an airgun from there once. 
Hooky: It was all black and I didn’t like that so I got me Dad to make the chrome scratch plates at work, which he did, God bless him. Do you remember it was out of tune when we did "Leaders Of Men”, from the G to the F? 
Barney: If you look closely you can see that he’s written the notes on the fretboard. Which isn’t a bad idea, really. It’s only ego that stops all musicians doing it.
Hooky: That’s mainly because we’d be playing and you’d shout, "Fucking hell, do a D!” and I’d have to look down. We’d bought a Palmer-Hughes How To Play The Bass book but it wasn’t any help.
Steven: I already had some drums because I’d been in both The Sunshine Valley Dance Band, who were an avant-garde jazz band, and a cabaret band. Bernard, you always think that was the name of the cabaret band but it wasn’t. We called ourselves that because we thought it would get us more gigs.
Barney: Did it?
Steven: No.

ROB GRETTON / TOUR PROGRAMME

Hooky: This is a typical Factory fuck-up. We were playing to twenty-odd thousand people a night for 30 dates and this Peter Savilie-designed programme arrived three nights before the end of the tour - 40,000 of them. We've still got about 37,000 in a lock- up. 
Barney: The quote on it is about when we met Rob. I was in a phone box calling Steve and this bloke walked past who’d approached us at a gig...
Steven: He was the DJ at Rafters. 
Barney: He came into the phone box and said, "I like your band, can I be your manager?” He was on his way to a job interview to be a toilet-cleaner so I told him to come to rehearsals.
Hooky: But he forgot to tell any of us. So we're rehearsing and this fat geezer with a beard comes in and pushes his glasses back. I’m looking at Steven wondering who he is, Ian’s looking at me and we're all looking at Bernard wondering why he isn’t looking at us. When we finished he explained. Rob was feeling pretty uncomfortable at the way we were responding because he didn’t know that we didn’t know.
Barney: We went to the pub and in those days we were so tight and skint we only bought our own drinks. We all went to the bar and came back without one for him, so he thought this was even worse.
Hooky: It’s just a Salford thing, getting your own drink.
Steven: I knew him anyway from Rafters, he was the rudest D| ever. You’d go up and say, “Can you play Patti Smith?” and he’d go, “No, fuck off.”
Barney: Were you down there doing your reviews for Record Mirror? Who were you doing? What was your pseudonym? 
Steven: I used me own name. I did The Ramones, Bob Seger, Barclay James Harvest, Ed Banger & the Nosebleeds... I drew the line at Smokie, I was getting eight pounds a review but I wasn’t reviewing Smokie.
Barney: What a career move, from one scummy profession to another - journalist to drummer.
Barney: This was the storyboard from the video for the re-issue of "Blue Monday” with the Quincy Jones remix. 
Steven: It was done by Will Wagman and Robert Breer...
Barney: Richard Briers?
Steven: No, Robert Breer. One did the photos of the dogs and had the Weimaraner and the other did flip-books but I never knew who was who.
Barney: Michael Schamberg, who ran Factory New York, found them. When we signed to Warners he became our video producer.
Hooky: In true Factory fashion he was a shit businessman but a great talent-spotter. I don't know where Tony met him but he was very much like Tony in many ways. He found us Jonathan Demme, Kathryn Bigelow... all these people who went on to be really big in film. But we got them so early that no-one noticed the connection when they made it big, because it had been so long ago.
Barney: He got us that guy who did The Stones’ film Shitkicker Blues...
Steven: Cocksucker Blues.
Barney: Yeah. I didn’t want to say “cock”.

PERNOD

Barney: Ah, now this is very interests because for a long time I thought Pernod was to blame for all of my hangovers.
Steven: Well, certainly a very large percentage.
Hooky: No, you were to blame.
Barney: I always used to have drinks no one else liked. I started with brown ale and then all the sort of stuff my mum used to have in her drinks cabinet, sherry etc. When I was 13 or 14, I used to wait till they were in bed and then get a glass from the drinks cabinet, get a cigar or some cigarettes that I had stashed, open the window and just sit there drinking and smoking in this big block of flats. And so I still like them.
I’ve stopped drinking Pernod now because it gives me just the worst hangovers. It got to the point where to have a good time on Saturday night I’d have to spend all day Sunday throwing up, so I switched to wine. But wine's no different, in fact it’s worse, because at least with the Pernod you’re diluting it with orange.
The worst hangover I ever had was after a night with Alex James from Blur. Me, him and Keith Allen went back to Alex’s after Groucho’s and at some point in the evening some absinthe appeared -1 didn’t find this out for three weeks. They say it makes you hallucinate and that didn’t happen, but everything seemed brighter and slightly weird. I got back to my hotel at 11 in the morning, they were due to chuck me out at 11:30, and my train wasn't due until five o'clock, so I thought I’d go to the Landmark Hotel and get a room just to throw up in.
I was at Marylebone Station and I didn’t realise at the time, but the station and the hotel are on opposite sides of the same street. So I get in the cab and he drives off and when I tell him where I want he just goes, "You Northern cunt, I've lost my place in the queue now," and does a U-turn. I gave him a fiver. The hotel wanted £300, so I thought, “fuck that, £300 just to be sick?"
I staggered out in a right state and saw a tourist Stakis hotel - just like a motorway hotel it was. I went in there and just got me fingers down me throat for five hours. Then I checked out and the guy on the desk was going, “But we’ve got you in for over night.” 
Hooky: When I was doing Revenge I got a call from Groucho’s and they said, "Is that Peter Hook? Can you come and get your friend Bernard. It’s just that we're trying to set the dining room for lunch and he’s asleep on the banquette with a big drool of saliva running from his mouth.” I said, “What time is it? I’m not working with Bernard at the moment, no chance.”
You’d been drinking with johnny Marr and Keith Allen and fallen asleep, and they were trying to eat around you.

ASHTRAY

Steven: This is a Winfield Ashtray from Woolworths. When we were rehearsing early on in Chetham Hill I was a prodigious smoker and the capacity was insufficient. So we modified it by drilling down to the base which was hollow and meant that we never had to empty it again. It reminds me of the first band car, a Citroen Safari, with a big round ashtray that also never needed emptying. You can say what you like about the French but they like a big ashtray.
Hooky: It was a big car, an eight-seater. It was the first band car, so were chuffed to fuck and all went down to buy it together. You know how these salesmen are... treat you like shit. We were arguing about which colour to get and Rob said that Steven should choose as he was the one who’d be driving it. There was a lovely metallic red model and we decided we’d go for that. He went over to the bloke and told him what we wanted and that guy just went, “Well, we’ve only got it in this colour”. Shit brown. 
Barney: Steve won't throw anything away. Who’d keep an old ashtray? He’s probably still got the Joy Division kettle - here it is look, he’s still got it. Who would want to use that? It’s black inside, look.

IAN CURTIS IN JOY DIVISION PHOTO

Barney: It reminds me of when it used to snow in Manchester. It's taken at Hanging Gate, right next to the barbers, where I used to get my hair cut. In fact, there are two barbers there, a good one and a shit one. Anyway, I went into the shit barbers one time andthere were all these tramps in there and the barber was taking newspaper, punching a hole in it and putting it over their heads to stop nits going everywhere. What does it remind you of, Steve?
Steve: It reminds me of why I went out without a coat on.
Barney: You've got your coat on, it's your geography teacher 's jacket. This was when you were looking like The Osmonds.

Hooky: Wasn't this when your mum used to buy your clothes. Wasn't this our first publicity shot? I think it was for the NME.

Barney: The thing with Ian was for most of the time he was a very normal guy.
Hooky: He was intense and ambitious and very driving, he really wanted us to succeed.
Barney: He was deeper than the average person, but the strange thing was before he died we'd never really listened to his lyrics and then when he died we thought, "Fuck, was there any sign of this in his lyrics?"
Hooky: The thing is at that age you'll never listen to each other's feeling or anything like that. We were just dead laddy. Also, it's amazing that they let Ian out when he was ill.
Barney: lan underwent a big personality change once he got epilepsy. The drugs they gave him were very severe barbiturates and he just went from being very stable to being very up and down. He went on a downward spiral.
Hooky: He was very frustrated by his illness, it used to drive him mad. Now, we'd know when he slashed himself up that it was a cry for help but the doctor gave him some pills and sent him home.
Barney: He came into rehearsals one day and he was just covered in cuts where he’d been slashing himself, up his arms, his chest. He said, “I just fell asleep and when I woke up I was covered in these". We said, "You want to get it seen to". He’d already taken an overdose but he panicked because he thought that if you didn't have enough pills you only got brain damage, you didn't die, so he rang for help then.
And then he went into a psychiatric hospital and they let him come out to do a fucking gig with us in Bury. He wanted to do the gig and I suppose we all thought it might cheer him up. Which is ridiculous for someone suffering from a mental illness.
Hooky: Why did they let him do that, it’s insane?
Steven: He was insane.
Hooky: Yes but why would we do that? 

Steven: It was “never cancel a gig". 

Hooky: Yes, but we had no experience with people. We had other singers from Factory bands do most of the set then we’d do the instrumentals and then Ian would come on and do “Heart And Soul” and two slow ones. The idea was we played all the fast ones with the lads and he’d come on at the end. He really wanted to do it.
Barney: So, when Ian went off a full scale riot ensued. One of our roadies was badly bottled, and it was all going off and Ian saw this, thought it was his fault and just crumbled. We took him back to hospital and it was a really incredibly stupid thing to do. Our intentions were good, cheer him up, make him forget about it all.
Hooky: Ironically, it was these kids Rob met outside who said they were big fans but didn’t have any money. So he let them in free, they started it all, real meatheads. 

Barney: The gig was very sad, but it wasn’t all bad because I never got hit. I’ve got a good Joy Division story. We were in London at a club in Soho and we were totally skint then. We’d started buying rounds at this point and it was Ian’s turn and he was up at the bar talking to this dead sophisticated looking bloke. He came back from the bar with this big smile saying, “You’ll never guess who I’ve been talking to, that’s The Captain from Island Records - and I’ve just done a great deal with him. Do you know who Grace Jones is?” And we went, “Yeah ” “Well, she wants to do a version of ’She’s Lost Control’ as ‘I’ve Lost Control’ and I’ve just got 40 quid for it” And he brings out this cheque, it might even have been 12 quid. “Let’s get the drinks in.” We were like, “What a sucker he is, was he pissed? Wait till he wakes up in the morning. Well done, Ian lad.” It was the first money we’d had. 

Hooky: I remember at our first London gig we went to the pub afterwards and spent all the money on ten pints, two pints each for the band and Rob, ’cos that’s what you do in Manchester at closing time. We sat down with them then looked round, and the whole pub was empty and the landlord was coming over going, “Hey you lot, fuck off - we're closed,” There's no drinking-up time in London. Ten pints, we had to leave them there... all our money from the gig.

THE MELODICA

Barney: It's a lovely colour, unfortunately they're not the best ones as the keys jam, they just look the best. The melodica we inherited from Ian. He was an Augustus Pablo fan and introduced it to us.
Hooky: He used it on “In A Lonely Place” with us just before he died.
Barney: In the two weeks before he died we wrote “In A Lonely Place” and “Ceremony” and recorded them on a shitty tape.
Hooky: No, we did record them in Graveyard Studios - with that guy with ginger hair - because you can hear them on the Joy Division box set 

Barney: So, we actually have got proper recordings of them? This is news to me. After he died we thought we’ve got a good starting point with these two songs and we started writing again, we got the rehearsal tapes out and got a little graphic equaliser and tried to pull the vocal out and we couldn’t quite get the lyrics. So we wrote down what we thought Ian’s lyrics were on both those songs. But now I’ve just found out that stupid old us went in the studio and recorded them. Why did we do that? 

Hooky: Because we forgot.
Barney: How could we forget about going in the studio? Are you sure?
Hooky: I found out when I was going through my tapes for the JD box set I had one tape with nothing written on it and I put it on and it had Ian singing “In A Lonely Place”. That version is 12 minutes long, the vocals are really low as it's just a rough mix. Martin Hannet had the eight-track master. 

Barney: After Ian died, Martin had a big falling out with Factory because he wanted to buy a Fairlight and Fac wanted to buy a nightclub and they were roughly the same price, or so we were led to believe. Martin went into a sulk saying, “you’ll lose loads”. 

Hooky: The fool, but he was right.

Next month: The rise and fall of the Hacienda, wrecking Peter Gabriel's studio, playing Baywatch and owning tanks.