2012 09 Peter Hook "Unknown Pleasures" book review, The Guardian

Love will tear us apart, again

Andy Beckett on a raw, surprising account of the classic post-punk band

Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

by Peter Hook
336pp, Simon & Schuster, £20

Of all the great doomed rock bands, with their mayfly lives and drawn-out, highly profitable after-lives, few have a legend as potent and precisely defined as Joy Division. They played their first concert in January 1978 and their last in May 1980. In that time they released two albums and a few other songs: a pop music close to unique in its icy, addictive bleakness. They wore stark, photogenic clothes and haunted the hollowed-out cities of a decaying northern England. Their singer, Ian Curtis, was so intense onstage that he had epileptic fits. The day before a pivotal first tour of the United States, he hanged himself. He was 23.

This solemn version of the Joy Division story has endured for decades, periodically reinforced by authoritative accounts such as Touching From a Distance, a claustrophobic 1995 memoir by Curtis’s widow Deborah; Control, an acclaimed 2007 band biopic, shot in reverential black and white and directed by onetime Joy Division photographer Anton Corbijn; and finally, by all the musicians who have drawn from Joy Division’s seemingly inexhaustible well of young male angst and moody looks and riffs.

Peter Hook was the band’s bassist. Much louder and more melodic than in traditional rock, his tough-but-tender throb and hum was the heart of their sound. Since their demise, he has been a leading curator in the Joy Division heritage industry, and gives over a substantial part of this book to a list of every concert the band played, sometimes with a set list as well. Even the group’s pre-history, as a less poised and original punk-influenced outfit called Warsaw, is lovingly detailed. Hook recalls his eager acceptance of a just-recorded live tape offered by the promoter of a Warsaw show, “the start of what was to become a collecting obsession”. And when the author listens to it? “What a great revelation – we were really good.” The rock star as fan writer about his own band is not, you fear, going to be the most rewarding of literary enterprises.

So it comes as a shock, and a welcome one, to discover quickly that the main project here is quite different. Hook wants to show his band’s rise and fall as messier, more collective and more human than the usual Curtis-dominated Romantic parable. Thus, instead of Joy Division as a quartet of tragic heroes – “Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders,” runs a much-cited Curtis lyric – Hook presents them as a gang of lippy, laddy northerners with a “reputation for trouble”.

There were frequent fights at their gigs: “All of my mates were involved,” he writes of one. “Like a giant ball rolling up and down in front of us as we were playing … Which of course wound me up. So I started kicking these kids from the stage … kicking them in the head.” To rehearse, the band used a disused mill near the centre of Manchester, “decorated with cans of our piss because the toilet was miles away”. At shows by rival groups, “We were terrible for nicking things … We used to [see] all this beautiful stuff backstage and nick it all.”

Hook writes with conversational glee about the scams and pranks that accompanied his band’s sharp-elbowed rise to prominence. The anecdotes can get tiresome, but the picture they build, of a seedy, arty, aggro-fuelled, semi-derelict urban England – of Manchester, in particular, before being bohemian was city council-approved – is revealing and vivid. Meanwhile, the pen portraits of his bandmates have a surprising delicacy. Drummer Stephen Morris had a jazzy, educated style and comfortably-off parents with “a koi-carp pond”. Guitarist Bernard Sumner was sly and self-contained, always finding a heater for himself for their freezing practice rooms. And Curtis was a chameleon: already married, but also “one of the lads”; a father, but also having an affair with a Belgian journalist; a pop star in the making, but also a devotee of the rock and literary avant garde. “By the end,” writes Hook with gruff astuteness, “there were just too many Ians [for him] to cope with.”

Exhaustion also took a toll. Joy Division, for all the graveyard stillness of their record sleeves, were participants in a frenetic golden age for British pop, which had begun with punk in 1976 and would peak, commercially at least, with the British dominance of the American charts in 1983. Groups grew up fast and seized their moment, or disappeared. Yet Joy Division did not earn enough from their feverish touring and recording to give up their day jobs. Hook worked in the offices of the Manchester Ship Canal Company, Curtis at an employment exchange, and Sumner for a film company where his “job was to colour in Danger Mouse”.

Such weird, novelistic details freshen the story throughout. But for Curtis at least, the pressure of multiple lives became increasingly perilous. In 1980 his epilepsy worsened fast. Onstage, Hook remembers “looking at Ian wondering if, or when, it was going to happen”. The fits left “some of the audience laughing, some scared, some cheering”. Britain in the early 80s could be a pretty cruel, unthinking place. Meanwhile Curtis’s lyrics, always melancholy, turned almost relentlessly morbid. With unsettling honesty, Hook tries to explain why the band did not see the crisis coming – or, if they did, do much to avert it. First, he rather jaw-droppingly admits: “We never really looked at his lyrics.” They could rarely hear them over the distorting roar of their crude practice and performance equipment; but also, the bandmates were increasingly “little musical islands”, concentrating on their individual parts, which Joy Division’s eccentric, dictatorial producer Martin Hannett – “a wizard surrounded by [dope] smoke and in charge of his strange machines” – isolated further into the group’s lovely, lonely archipelago of sound. By the spring of 1980, that sound seemed ready to be played in stadiums, and the band, Curtis included, were reluctant to slow down. For what followed, concludes Hook, “We’re all of us to blame.”

As an attempt to rewrite the Joy Division legend, this uneven book succeeds only partially. For all the gritty new context and boisterous new stories here, Curtis still dominates. But Hook has restored a flesh-and-blood rawness to what was becoming a standard tale. Few pop music books manage that.