2006 03 Q Classic Morrissey and The Story of Manchester - Part 6 - Martin Hannett

POST PUNK IN MANCHESTER

In 1978, Joy Division turned their raw musicianship into a virtue, inventing an austere, intense, industrial sound. When local media figure Tony Wilson signed them to his new Factory label, a legendary era began.

Heart & Soul

Martin Hannett was Factory Records' genius in-house producer - a sonic alchemist inspired by dub and drugs. Martin Aston charts his mercurial rise and tragic end.

"I WAS OUTRAGED," snorts Tony Wilson, former MD of Factory Records, when the subject of his late friend, business partner and nemesis is raised. “Last year I picked up this magazine article titled ‘The Ten Craziest Producers Of All Time’. And it didn’t include Martin Hannett! I immediately called the assistant editor, and said,‘You fucking cockney shite, how can you miss him off?’

“24 Hour Party People [the dramatised story of Wilson and Factory Records] had some wonderful moments, but for me the most wonderful of all was reading another article that said, ‘At last Andy Serkis gets to play somebody really weird.’ Serkis played Gollum in Lord Of The Rings, and Gollum’s a fucking insurance salesman compared to Martin!”

Ten years after his death, Martin Hannett remains a key par of the Manchester legend. This is, after all, not just the man who midwived records by some of the city’s most iconic bands, including the seismic milestones that were Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and Closer albums, and whose work for American trio ESG spawned some of the most sampled beats ever. This is the producer who once spent a week crawling around the studio floor trying to locate a particular sound frequency (“I entered a state of existential fear,” he confessed); who would scream at artists he was producing to leave the studio and let him get on with their record; who’d listen to his mixes from inside the studio storeroom with the door locked; who once cradled a gun on camera while explaining his contribution to Factory Records.

A man who eventually secured himself a heroin and alcohol habit before dying in his armchair in 1991, aged just 42 and weighing twice his usual 12 stone.

For the man that Wilson emphatically maintains “invented modern music”, how did it go so right, and so wrong?

THERE ARE GENERALLY two kinds of producers. There’s the level-headed, corporate type who interpret the artist’s wishes while satisfying the record company’s directives. And then there are those who consider themselves to be the artistic equal of the musicians they’re working with, who drive themselves (and everyone nearby) crazy by their obsessive search for the sound in their brain. Producers such as Joe Meek, Phil Spector and Martin Hannett.

For a visionary, megalomaniac type, it’s fitting that Hannett’s first musical experience, aged 11, was hearing Spector's wall-of-sound creations “at a local fairground, sitting underneath enormous Wharfedale speakers”, he recalled. In the ’60s, via a cousin of his friend Chris Lee who'd bring records back from the US, the teenage Hannett devoured hard-to-find imports. “He’d listen to the usual suspects,” Lee recalls,“but especially anything off-the-wall, because of the production — The Doors, Love, the Velvets, Captain Beefheart.”

Hannett studied chemistry at Manchester University, imbibing the recreational drugs of the day, LSD and marijuana. It was during this time that Lee noted the beginning of “the Hannett persona, swathed in a big scarf and a mop of curly hair, and acting aloof and hipper-than-thou to those he didn’t know. It was hard to tell if he was stoned or tripping, which was the path he chose until the end. We’d talk about things such as dinosaurs versus chromosome damage, that there'd be evolution rather than revolution... He took his psychedelics very seriously.”

While juggling work as a lab chemist, a soundman and a fledgling producer, Hannett also played bass alongside vocalist Lee in the short-lived Willy & The Zip Guns. But Hannett suffered stage fright (“He bought a 20-foot-long bass lead so he could stand at the back, turned away from the audience,” says Lee), and in any case, he had more idealistic ambitions. In 1975 he co-launched a music cooperative, Music Force, which began promoting local bands and supplying stage equipment. “It fitted in with the idea of the times,” Lee explains. “Martin wanted musicians to control their own destinies, create their own gigs, and make their own records.”

Little wonder that punk was Hannett's true calling. “He saw punk as an anarchic challenge to society rather than a business,” says the Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley, but Lee recognised a secondary motive: “As opposed to dealing with uppity musos like Sad Cafe, punk bands gave Martin the raw materials that he could manoeuvre and mould. Peter Hook was the prime example, because when they formed Warsaw no one was the bass player, so Hook was given a bass and Martin told him how to ‘wear’ it.”

But it was with the Buzzcocks that Hannett got his break. Besides finding the band gigs, the knowledgeable Hannett was the obvious choice to help them realise an ambition to release their own single; the resulting Spiral Scratch EP produced by “Martin Zero” triggered Britain’s DIY punk revolution.

Shelley: “ln the control room, as last as Marlin was twiddling the knobs and faders, the engineer was moving them back, saying, ‘You can’t have that’; he was already experimenting, but it still surprises me now how alive and fresh Spiral Scratch sounds.” 

“When you play Spiral Scratch loud, it sounds exactly as if you’re right in front of the stage at one of their gigs,” was Hannett’s view. “I was very disappointed when the Sex Pistols album came out with 17 guitar overdubs.”

Bolstered by the EP's critical and commercial status, Hannett launched Rabid Records with local entrepreneur Tosh Ryan, producing records by Rabid signings Slaughter & The Dogs and John Cooper Clarke (whom Hannett also briefly managed). He also worked on Jilted John’s debut single, which shared Spiral Scratch’s dense, metallic clarity. Re-released on EMI, the song went Top 5, making it Hannett’s one bona fide smash, but punk’s two-chord ethos was too limiting, as Hannett discovered when he first saw Warsaw at Salford College of Technology.” I wasn’t very impressed,” Lee remembers, “and Tosh got into a row with Martin, saying the band were fascists, but Martin said,‘No, no, this is the future.”

THE PRODUCER'S relationship with Factory had begun earnestly, when Tony Wilson sought his advice on starting a record label, but the two men almost came to blows on their first meeting. In an article, Hannett had rubbished So It Goes, Granada TV's groundbreaking music show presented and moulded by Wilson. When the two met at a Slaughter & The Dogs gig, Wilson told Hannett to fuck off. “But nobody says fuck off to Martin,” says Wilson,“and I heard he spent the rest of the night waiting in the car park for me.”

A clearly wayward Hannett still won Wilson over: “He was brilliant; I could just see it in his eyes.” When Factory put four bands (including the newly christened Joy Division) into the studio for its debut release, A Factory Sampler, Hannett assumed the role of Factory’s in-house producer.

Wilson claims that Hannett’s revolutionary touch was apparent as soon as he’d taken delivery of the very first digital delay machine (where notes are repeated, like an echo) from Burnley electronics company AMS Neve. “It arrived five days before he did those first Joy Division tracks, which is why one track's called Digital,” says Wilson. “In 1992, totally by chance, I met AMS founder Stuart Nevison, who told me Martin was incredibly important to his business. I didn’t know it then, but Nevis said he’d drive to the top of the moors, and this strange man would arrive in a battered Volvo and sit in Phil’s car [on acid, Lee vouches] and describe the sounds he was imagining in his head. Phil would drive back and modify the machine to create that sound. Martin was AMS’s crazed, drugged-up hippy adviser! Every studio in the world, from Tokyo to Seattle, had an AMS after that.”

Hannett was able to play with his new toy frequently as Factory’s A&R arm got busy. First up was A Certain Ratio’s debut single, All Night Party, followed by Liverpool synth-pop duo Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. “Martin was bonkers and scary and intimidating,” Andy McCluskey recalls, though his OMD partner Paul Humphries adds,“We learnt so much in terms of understanding sound and space. His attention to detail was remarkable. He had this crappy little Marshall time modulator, which he put on everything, and a rack of digital delays. He said little, made minimal actions, and yet it all worked. But he’d get so stoned. One time we found him flat out under the mixing desk, fast asleep. Maybe that’s the secret of good record production.” 

Vini Reilly had a similarly factious experience. The only member of local quintet The Durutti Column to stay onboard after Wilson insisted Hannett record their album, Reilly liked this madcap boffin: “He was very kind, and had a dry sense of humour, but an oblique way of conversation - you could spend 10 minutes wondering what he meant. But he had this remarkable spark.” The sessions nonetheless proved tense — Reilly was chronically depressed and suffering from anorexia nervosa; Hannett’s communication skills were limited.“The first morning in the studio, Martin fiddled with all these funny old boxes for what seemed like hours, making funny noises, while I just sat in the corner,” says Reilly. “He didn’t say a word. Eventually I screamed, ‘I’m fucking sick of this!’and he said, calmly, ‘Relax, Vini, it’ll be fine.’ I realised it was his method of pulling my brain around to somewhere otherworldly. Suddenly he got this twittering bird sound, which I started playing along to. Martin invented a simple drum and snare pattern, I added a second guitar, and that was the first track, Sketch For Summer, finished.”

Hannett mixed the finished album,The Return of Durutti Column, on his own; Reilly was then presented with the white label. “I was flabbergasted, because it sounded nothing like how I'd played,” says Reilly. “I hated it for two years, but after I heard his work with Joy Division, I realised he’d given my body of work a very strong identity that I couldn’t have.”

The album’s spectral, cloistered ambience was the first palpable proof of Hannett’s sonic imagination. “He had this theory about creating a room in which he could hear the music, and then he tried to get that across” explains Pete Shelley. “The way he worked, to me he was an alchemist, or a mystic.”

Naturally, it helped if you recorded with Hannett while on the same druggy wavelength as the producer. As early as Spiral Scratch, Shelley noted Hannett smoked “copious amounts” of cannabis — “good for the ears” the producer enthused, and ears were the most important instrument of them all. According to Lee, Hannett had been smoking heroin since the mid-’70s, and as his drug intake evolved and increased, so its effects — combining both the mind-expanding ‘up’ phase and the comedown paranoia and isolation — were all reflected in his next challenge: the band he considered “the future”.

The problem was that Joy Division guitarist Bernard Sumner and bassist Peter Hook had strong opinions themselves. Still inexperienced, the band needed direction — but the producer’s confidence, and ability, was rising. “They were a gift to a producer because they didn’t have a clue,” Hannett said. Essentially, Hannett bullied them. “If Hooky had been able to communicate to me what exactly it was that he wanted, instead of saying it wasn't what he wanted...” he fumed.

Like Reilly, Joy Division initially hated their album - which Hannett attempted to mix without them — but eventually recognised his brilliance. Unknown Pleasures’ soundscape was a paradoxical creation, austere yet inviting. Hannett’s unique drum sound was achieved via tape compression, his dub technique inspired, he said, by reggae producer Joe Gibbs, and the eerie drama from soaking almost everything in reverb, delay and echo.

“Martin was the only person I knew to record the sound of one hand clapping,” says Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon. “In cyberspace. And then add reverb.”

In a rare interview Hannett gave me in 1989, he revealed the source for his approach to Joy Division.

Bizarrely, it was ’50s country superstar Patsy Cline. “That echo, those low notes, why the drums sounded like that... We had several angles, though. Unknown Pleasures wouldn’t have sounded that way if it hadn’t been for The Doors’ Strange Days. It was a question of giving it an identity fast, so we hammered out a way to do it.” 

As for Joy Division’s next album, Closer, Hannett considered it “cabbalistic, locked in its own mysterious world... Ian was crumbling, but it all came together in a magical way. I invented all these little tricks, to do with generating sound images, like a holographic principle. Light and shade...”

HANNETT WAS ABLE to expand his sonic tricks across a slew of emerging bands, but a pattern emerged. Each time he had control, he’d cut loose and have fun, such as when he was given an open brief to mould a pulsing, psychedelic backdrop for John Cooper Clarke’s albums under the guise of The Invisible Girls. “The phrase ‘24-hour party people’ is about right,” recalls Pete Shelley, who contributed guitar to the sessions. Hannett’s next Buzzcocks collaboration, on a trio of experimental A- and B-sides, was another party.“ We were all taking loads of acid, coke... all sense of time went out the window,” says Shelley. “I remember making mad underwater sounds, a strange procession with the contents of a percussion box... It’s remarkable we got anything done.” 

Magazine’s album The Correct Use Of Soap was, Hannett told journalist Bert van der Kamp, “professionally my best”, because he felt he was among friends. But when bands were as temperamental and challenging as he was, the mood turned confrontational.“He’d talk in riddles and confuse us to create a very tense sound,” observed Martin Moscrop, of bleak funk merchants A Certain Ratio. “When we recorded All Night Party, he kept on asking us to ‘play the tune faster but slower’. Confusing or what? If he wound the drummer up enough, they would hit the drums really loud, play faster and create a feel of tension. But we weren’t comfortable with the sound Martin got for us, as it was a bit gothic and not American enough.”

Hannett's domineering touch proved his undoing, starting with a shaky and vulnerable New Order following their singer's death. To make their debut album Movement, the band needed the kind of empathic guidance Hannett was unable to provide. The producer sought to downplay drums, exactly when the band wanted to play them up so as to cover the shortcomings of Sumner’s vocal style. “It also took more time to refine those little sonic tricks I’d invented for Closer,” Hannett revealed. With Curtis’s absence creating a funereal mood, the sessions proved wearing.

Hannett continued to search for new sounds, and new machines. In 1981 he demanded that Factory buy him the new technological marvel, the Fairlight. Wilson: “We said, ‘What, £30,000? Sorry, we’re spending the money on a nightclub’— which was the Hacienda. Trevor Horn gets the Fairlight and does Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and the rest is history. If we hadn’t been so mean and utterly stupid, Martin would have invented the next stage in music.” 

Hannett, who’d been rewarded for his work not with royalties but a partnership in Factory, was apoplectic at what he viewed as a rip-off, and in 1982 issued a lawsuit against his fellow directors. “[Tony’s] pinched my intellectual property. He made the company worth nothing, and gave me 23 per cent of it,” he told Jon Savage. So furious was he that, during one phone conversation with New Order manager Rob Gretton, Hannett shot at the receiver with a gun, Phil Spector-style.

Although the renewed electronic vigour of New Order’s post-Movement singles Everything’s Gone Green and Temptation showed that they and Hannett could produce magic together, New Order elected to go it alone, as did A Certain Ratio. Hannett — who’d turned down U2 after producing their breakthrough single 11 O'Clock TickTock out of loyalty to the hastily regrouping New Order —was devastated.

“We didn’t realise how badly he’d take it,’’Wilson sighs. “With the rejection over the Fairlight added in, Martin took it all as a lover’s rejection. And out of everyone, I think Ian’s death hit Martin the hardest. He turned up at my house once, crying, like, 'What a loss, why did he do it?'’ 

While Factory board meetings retained an empty chair to represent him, Hannett sunk into heroin-insulated despair. By the time he returned to the studio in 1985, he’d settled out of court with Factory for £40,000, which disappeared straight up his arm and nose.“I went back to my eight-track in my bedroom for a year,” he told me in 1989.“I felt the Hacienda was going to be a total fuck-up. Which it nearly was. It slowed everyone down to an enormous extent.”

The band that encouraged him to work again was an unproven Manchester bunch, The Stone Roses. Singer Ian Brown called the session “a disaster. He was only half there. We caught him snorting coke off the There’s No One Quite Like Grandma gold disc! He was a junkie; lovely man, but nothing else mattered.”

Ironically, Factory proved his salvation. At the suggestion of label director Alan Erasmus and Happy Mondays manager Nathan McGough, he was brought in to produce the band’s second album, Bummed. “A brilliant decision, and a fantastic album,” reckons Wilson. “He broke the Mondays with Wrote For Luck.” 

Like most junkies who eventually wean themselves off heroin, Hannett was drinking heavily and putting on loads of weight. “By the end of my tussle with Factory,” he told me, “I had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a seven-can-a-day habit. It’s done me nothing but harm.”

Hannett continued to produce. New Fast Automatic Daffodils,The High and Kitchens of Distinction were all drawn by his reputation, but the inspiration had gone. KOD frontman Patrick Fitzgerald recalls: “Martin was animated during recording, but each day, he’d drink and smoke spliff until he fell asleep. The third night, he fell asleep, slumped over the faders. And all he’d talk about down the pub was how bitter he still felt about Factory.”

ON 18 APRIL 1991, Hannet’s heart, unable to cope with a man weighing 24 stone, finally gave up.“I was amazed at the number of people who turned up to his funeral,” says Chris Lee. “People who’d dismissed him, there in their hundreds. And then they go and make his funeral a joke in 24 Hour Party People, when Tony Wilson laughs about his coffin being too big to get in the ground.” Lee prefers Hannett’s legacy to be “this beautiful shining man who got snared by heroin, yet created some of the most amazing music in the second half of the 20th century, who sadly died far too young”.

For Wilson, nothing less than “the man who invented modern music” will do. “Blue Monday gets the credit for that, which was the first thing New Order did without Martin, but Bernard got all that from watching Hannett. He was the first to link those early Apple computers with keyboards.That was revolutionary.”

“No sound was ever enough for Martin,” Vini Reilly concludes. “He’d keep searching for bigger, wider, more exploratory stuff, looking for that extra dimension. Like, how far can you reach out?That was Martin.”