2006 03 Q Classic Morrissey and The Story of Manchester - Part 11 - Joy Division

ODE TO JOY

Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures has become one of the most influential albums of all time. Peter Hook and Stephen Morris help Roy Wilkinson trace its genesis through crates of Vimto, mysterious moorland meetings and industrial rhythms.

STRAWBERRY STUDIOS SITS on Stockport’s Waterloo Road — a street whose Victorian brickwork and sturdy facades suggest time slipping stoically by. Fifty years before Joy Division arrived to record their debut album, Unknown Pleasures, in April 1979, Waterloo Road was home to the marine engineers F Bamford & Co, experts in the hydrodynamic arts. Bamfords supplied the propellers that powered Sir Henry Segrave to a world water-speed record in 1930. After that successful run, a further dash across Lake Windermere sent Segrave to his death.

Of course, you can find portentous signs for Ian Curtis’s suicide anywhere - if you look hard enough. But the link between this band and their historical surroundings has always seemed very real. From producer Martin Hannett’s perspective, at least, Unknown Pleasures was consciously intended to echo Manchester’s industrial heritage. Hannett coloured the album with his recordings of clanking lifts and studio simulations of humming circuitry. Talking after his work on Unknown Pleasures, Hannett made clear his fascination for industrial cacophony.

“I was struck, years ago, by a room full of air compressors at the Ferranti factory,” he said. “It was banging out this four-in-the-bar, industrial bass-drum rhythm. I just stood in the centre of the room for hours.”

Unknown Pleasures has, of course, been a hugely influential album. Joy Division’s songs, style and Ian Curtis’s words combined with Martin Hannett’s production to create a template that still bewitches endless young rock groups, the Editors to name just one. Amazingly enough, it was only when Joy Division started to record Unknown Pleasures that the quality and originality of what they were doing was revealed to their own ears.

“This was the first time I actually remember hearing Ian’s words’ bassist Peter Hook tells me in the studio annexe at his imposing Cheshire home. “The monitor speakers at gigs were always so poor and our time in the studio was always so rushed that I’d never really heard his vocals before. I’d never heard Bernard’s guitar and I’d never heard Ian’s vocals. I was just blown away - ‘Fucking hell, that guitar sounds fantastic! Fucking hell, those lyrics are wonderful!’ Before that you were over playing in your own corner, just so you could hear your amp. To hear those things was absolutely fantastic. Suddenly you just realised that you were part of something really, really good.”

THE STORY OF Unknown Pleasures involved crates of Vimto, endless personal abuse and the inception of Factory Records as fully functioning record company. In the weeks leading up to recording, Factory’s Tony Wilson thought it a fait accompli that the album wouldn’t be released through his label. The band had recorded two tracks for the A Factory Sample EP and then recorded an album’s worth of demos for RCA. Manager Rob Gretton had been negotiating with Warners. It seemed highly likely that Joy Division’s first LP would be released on Martin Rushent’s Warners-funded Genetic label. Then, one night, this all changed.

“I remember the night very well,” Tony Wilson tells me as he walks William, his ill-disciplined Weimaraner, through a Manchester park. “We were out at the Band On The Wall in Manchester [a venue currently closed for refurbishment] . Rob just turned to me and in his strange, non-demonstrative way said, ‘Why don’t we do the first album with you before going to Warners?’ My first, automatic response was, ‘Are you sure? Do you think that’s a good idea?’ That’s how deeply stupid I was — it never occurred to me that we might put out an album. However,Joy Division signing to Warners would have been typical of that period. Punk didn’t say, ‘Go indie, fuck the majors.’ Malcolm McLaren signed the Pistols to every fucking label that would have them.”

Gretton’s idea wasn’t based entirely on solid business reasoning, however. “Absolutely not,” says Tony. “Rob was quite open about this. One of the main reasons he went with us was that he wouldn’t have to get on a train to London every week and ‘talk to cunts’. No one could use the word‘cockney’with as much contempt as Rob. But he’d also done his sums and calculated that if things went right, and with the 50-50 profit-share deal we had, Joy Division could make as much money as with Warners.”

Gretton's proposal wasn’t one that Wilson had been anticipating, but recent events meant it was something he had the money to pay for. Tony’s mother had died, leaving him £15,000 in her will. Rob Gretton calculated that recording and releasing the album would cost around £8,000. Wilson says that, in the end, Unknown Pleasures cost £18,000 up front.

“Did I worry about the money?” ponders Wilson. “No, not for a moment. How could you worry about that kind of thing when you were working with one of the greatest rock groups of all time?”

PETER HOOK SAYS that these days he only goes to Stockport if he’s feeling depressed and wants cheering up. “It could always be worse,” he thinks to himself - “I could be living here.” Certainly many of Stockport’s pubs are unreconstructed affairs - so much so that soft Southern visitors must imagine they are outlying props stores for 1960s Coronation Street sets. But the town seems charming, with a village atmosphere accentuated by a town-centre signpost inscribed with a quaint array of directions: Carlisle 118½ miles, Buxton 18 miles, Hazel Grove 2½ miles.

The three remaining members of Joy Division all live within striking distance of the town where they recorded their debut album. Stephen Morris lives with Gillian Gilbert, his wife and New Order bandmate, at their farmhouse outside Macclesfield. Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook both live in Alderley Edge.

The pool room that adjoins Hooky’s home studio is, in part, a shrine to Joy Division and Factory. There are two huge, five-foot-tall photographic prints of Ian Curtis.The walls are further lined with Factory memorabilia. There’s a photograph of an unidentified pro-Soviet British spy, one that previously hung on the wall of the Hacienda’s Gay Traitor cocktail bar. Perhaps to Hooky’s amusement, this particular gay traitor looks very like a young Bernard. There’s also a framed front page from the Manchester Evening News: “Hacienda Rave Ends In Riot!” With evident fondness, Peter points to his first-ever guitar. The fretboard still features the positions of notes painted on by the apprentice teenage bassist.

As Hooky remembers it, Unknown Pleasures was recorded and mixed in nine days. Or, more accurately, nights. The band would arrive at around 4pm, work through until around 6am and then drive home.

Strawberry was the premier studio in the north-west. It was owned by 10cc and was where they recorded the likes of I’m Not In Love. But a list of the bands who used Strawberry before Joy Division suggests the studio was unlikely to be confused with, say, Berlin’s Hansa Ton. Herman’s Hermits, the Syd Lawrence Orchestra, Freddie And The Dreamers, Neil Sedaka, the Lancashire Cricket Club and The Scaffold had all popped in. Then there was the 1970 Top 5 hit Neanderthal Man, recorded at Strawberry by a precursor of 10cc called Hotlegs.

The Unknown Pleasures sessions had little of the jollity implied by Neanderthal Man. Hooky remembers Hannett overseeing the recording in condescending and abrasive style.

“It was always cold,” he says. “Martin used to sit at the desk with the air-conditioning on full blast in the control room. So he was nice and warm while we were freezing cold. He used to try and drive us out of the studio. He was doing everything he could to be obnoxious - all the time. He was very good in the way he suggested loads of things to try, but he was also very obtuse. He would come up with these airy-fairy suggestions — ‘Make it sound like candyfloss being driven over by a steamroller.’” 

Of all of Joy Division, drummer Stephen Morris had his contribution most heavily affected by Hannett’s production. But Morris recalls the producer’s presence more happily. “Martin had his ways,” he tells me on the phone from his farm, “but I liked working with him. At the time, some of the things he did seemed like witchcraft. I remember when we recorded the smashed bottles for I Remember Nothing — Martin had found out I had a replica of a [World War II] Walther P38 German pistol in my car. He insisted the bottles were smashed with the gun, because ‘it would sound better’. I think Rob smashed the bottles — he had specs which qualified as industrial eye protectors.” 

Chris Nagle was a house engineer at Strawberry and engineered on Unknown Pleasures. Chris sees method in Martin Hannett’s approach.

“Yes,” he says. “You could take Martin’s attitude as being purely obnoxious, but he did have this knack of getting performances out of people. The end maybe justified the means. For instance, there was the time Martin had Joy Division completely break down and reassemble the drumkit. There was a technical reason for that, but he was also imposing a kind of lateral thinking on the band.”

WITH MARTIN THE martinet presiding over the studio amid a fug of Manc sarcasm, the sessions clearly were no love-in. The bracing atmosphere was accentuated by the band’s lack of money.

“I think we had £1.50 a day to live on,” says Hooky.“The way I remember it was, you could have a pint or have something to eat.The best thing about the studio was there was always a crate of Vimto. We used to drink Vimto by the gallon, because it seemed like a luxury.When the studio started losing money, it wasn’t the staff’s Porsches that went, it was the Vimto.

“That’s maybe where we learnt the business acumen that we applied to the Hacienda, he adds. “When it’s going bad, cut the Vimto and forget about the things that are losing you thousands of pounds...”

Beyond even the Vimto, Stephen Morris remembers new levels of luxury at Strawberry.

“It was exciting,” he says. “Suddently we were at a proper recording studio. They had a kitchen and a TV, which seemed incredible. They also had a car cigarette lighter built into the studio desk - amazing! We recorded at weekends — we were using studio downtime around John Cooper Clarke recording his Disguise In Love album. I think we were in there slightly on the QT, with Martin having obtained a special, semi-legal arrangement for us.”

Even today, Hooky remembers the sessions with a slightly shellshocked tone — Hannett’s attitude to the young band was “disgusting”, he says. And more besides: “He was actually quite frightening. He was a very disturbing character and you didn’t really feel like answering back. He was very volatile, throwing tantrums all the time.”

But maybe the studio’s humdrum-bordering-on-austere location and Hannett’s severe presence were of a piece with the music that was being recorded. Bernard Sumner was quite clear about the sombre, oppressive milieu that, for him, formed Joy Division’s music. Sumner talks about a Salford childhood encompassed by chemical works and the polluted River Irwell — a time saddened further by deaths in the family and the way his terraced street was demolished and replaced by a towerblock.

“I realised then that I could never go back to that happiness,” Sumner told Jon Savage. “For me, Joy Division was about the death of my community and my childhood.”

Maybe it was for the greater good that Hannett’s personality maintained such cheerless moods in the studio. But whether or not the album benefited from his method misery, the producer’s vision was self-evident. Hannett was clearly a producer who was unafraid to think boldly, to plot Spector-esque grand vistas in his mind and then take it from there. But he also applied the clean-cut methodology of physics and electrical circuitry. Hannett arrived at the Unknown Pleasures sessions equipped with one of the worlds first digital-delay units.

“I’d had the new AMS delay for about two weeks,” he said. “It was heaven sent.”

AMS was the Burnley company Advance Music Systems. Tony Wilson remembers AMS's Mark Crabtree and Stuart Nevison developing their digital-delay unit in “a shed that had been recorded in the Domesday Book”. Crabtree and Nevison created the device with some input from Martin Hannett. The two parties would meet some time after midnight in a car park up on the Lancashire moors. Here, Hannett would describe the sonic pictures in his head and the AMS duo would ponder how best to transfer all this to their box of wires.The delay unit would have a crucial impact on Unknown Pleasures — with digital delay underpinning Stephen Morris’s crisp, metronomic drumming, Hannett created the drum sound that would define this album and be endlessly copied through the ’80s.

In past decades, the north-west seemingly overflowed with such fantastic initiative. There was Factory Records alighting on the phrase “The Hacienda must be built” in an obscure Situationist text - and somehow getting from that to a nightclub that would help shape Britain’s cultural history. It was the bluff, bearded and secretly erudite Gretton who came up with the phrase about the Hacienda being built. But as he sat in Strawberry alongside Joy Division, it would be impossible to imagine him dispensing such ripe abstraction. Both manager and band only displayed their earthbound, laddish aspect to the world. This was a set-up fond of practical joking, porn movies and endless generalised guffawing.

“We were all in together,” says Hooky,“and Ian was as well at that point. I don’t think his epilepsy had started and he was just fine. That LP was probably the only one where the four of us were together in that way. By the time we did Closer, Ian was ill and he was also very involved in his breakup with his wife, so that was fractious and strained. With Movement we were just fucked, because Ian was dead. From Movement on, our relationship has always been difficult.”

And if Martin Hannett was a testy presence for these recordings, he wasn’t yet at his most eccentric. Neither had he yet acquired the full-scale drug habit that would contribute to his fatal heart attack in 1991.

“Martin was probably at his brightest at this point,” says Hooky. “His drug addiction got worse and worse as time went on. With Unknown Pleasures he was in the control room actually listening to things. By the time we were doing Movement, he was locking himself in the storeroom, saying if he heard anything he liked he’d come out. He never came out. He sat in the tape room doing cocaine, and when the cocaine ran out he went home.”

Of the 10 songs that would make Unknown Pleasures, nine were written before the band entered the studio. Only Candidate was written at Strawberry. The album was mixed with the band again having to endure a less than welcoming approach from Hannett. He would phone Rob Gretton at maybe two in the morning and tell him he was about to start mixing. Hooky was kept on alert at this period, ready to scramble to Strawberry. He’d get up, put a single gallon of petrol into his car — all he could generally afford — and head over to Stockport. After a few of these early-morning missions, Unknown Pleasures was finished.

THE ALBUM WAS completed, but not to the band’s satisfaction. Martin Hannett’s spacious, atmospheric sound was a refined, subtle thing compared with Joy Division’s dreadnought live presence.

“That was a big, big lesson for me,” says Tony Wilson. “You can produce one of the greatest albums in history and the musicians don’t like it. It was just,‘We don’t like this.’To which we replied, ‘OK, now fuck off’ Between me and Rob and Martin there was never any question that this was anything but an amazing album. The band never suggested it shouldn’t come out, though — which was maybe a sign of deep-seated intelligence on their part.”

To this day, Peter Hook clearly can’t find it in himself to love Unknown Pleasures. But he has long since rationalised the virtues of both the album and Martin Hannett.

“It definitely didn’t turn out sounding the way I wanted it,” he says. “It didn’t sound anything like I envisaged it. But I can now see that Martin did a good job on it. He made it something that would last for people, whereas Bernard and I would’ve just done a straight-ahead rock record. There’s no two ways about it, Martin Hannett created the Joy Division sound. Bernard and I completely ripped Martin off — we ripped off everything he’d shown us.We learnt to do it ourselves and then got rid of him!” 

While there was some dissatisfaction with the recordings, there was unanimous enthusiasm for the album’s sleeve. The front-cover image came from one of Bernard’s school textbooks. It’s a graphic plot representing radio waves from a distant star — electromagnetic emissions from the pulsar designated PSR 1919+21.The image was realised by designer Peter Saville.

“With Unknown Pleasures,” says Saville, “Joy Division knew exactly what they wanted, whereas with Closer they came and asked if I had any ideas. Manchester is concrete underpasses and a gothic-revival cathedral. For me, Unknown Pleasures was the concrete underpass and Closer was the gothic cathedral.”

“That image is one of the most bootlegged in history,” says Tony Wilson. “We never, ever made one T-shirt — they were all bootlegs. Rob would always be going, ‘I’ve found out who’s doing all these bootlegs, I’m going to see ’em.’And we’d be like, ‘Yeah, Rob, give them hell.’Then he’d come back and tell us it was all sorted. We’d ask what he’d got and the answer would always be, ‘Two each.’ He’d get a few T-shirts off them and that would be that [laughs] .”

Unknown Pleasures was released in June 1979. Sales were modest, with only 5,000 copies initially delivered to the shops. But the album was immediately proclaimed a profound and distinctive work — a consensus that has remained in place ever since. Apart from, perhaps with Peter Hook.

“I just never play Unknown Pleasures,” he says. “I play Closer all the time and always enjoy it — apart from the bass, which should be far louder of course [laughs] . The only time I can remember listening to Unknown Pleasures is when we need to transcribe a song to play live. When you hear the songs live they’re clearly wonderful, but... Maybe it’s because Unknown Pleasures is the one that’s rammed down your throat a bit. It’s the album that new bands seem to relate to, the one they take their bearings from.”

Stephen Morris had no qualms about the finished record. “I liked the album,” he says. “I always thought an album should fulfil a different need to a live show - and the drums sounded great [laughs] . You can understand how Bernard might be less pleased, when he had this big noise coming out of his amp and it ended up sounding like a wasp on a tin. I still really like Unknown Pleasures — if you want to know what Joy Division were like live you can listen to that Bains Douches official bootleg. Or, heaven forbid, that other one recorded in Preston...”

Tony Wilson has never wavered in his certainty that Unknown Pleasures was a great work. But even for him, years elapsed before it gave him that goalscorer’s moment of glory and gratification.

“When the album came out,” he says,“there was no moment of epiphany - no moment when it all snapped into focus and you felt elated.They were a great band, but once you’d realised that, you just expected them to be great. Then, about 15 years later, I was out in Los Angeles on a lovely, sunny LA evening. We’d gone to see Michael Mann’s Heat. Halfway through there was a car chase and this music came booming out. After the song had been playing for about 15 seconds I thought,‘Fuck, this is one of my records. What the fuck is it?’ Then I realised it was Moby doing his version of New Dawn Fades. I was just overwhelmed by a wave of emotion. If there was ever a moment when I enjoyed Unknown Pleasures, that was it. It took me completely by surprise and left me feeling one thing - I had been fortunate beyond belief to have been involved in the making a record as great as Unknown Pleasures.” ■