2012 10 28 Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division Observer Review

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/28/unknown-pleasures-peter-hook-review

Here are the young men...

A memoir by Joy Division bassist Peter Hook is steeped in guilt, writes Dorian Lynskey

Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

Peter Hook

Simon & Schuster £20, pp336

It is 16 October 1979. Manchester quartet Joy Division have just played a show in Brussels and are a few days away from recording Atmosphere, the sepulchral masterpiece that will take on uncanny weight seven months later, when the body of 23-year-old singer Ian Curtis is found hanging in his kitchen. On this particular night, however, Curtis is urinating in an ashtray in his bandmates’ youth hostel room. “Ha, you wankers, I’m pissing in your room,” says this tortured poet, this future icon of doomed youth. “Ha ha, pissing in your room!”

This anecdote is typical of bass guitarist Peter Hook’s conflicted account of his first band’s cruelly abbreviated existence. The Joy Division story often appears misleadingly neat in the telling: two near-perfect albums of unusual grace and gravity, then a human catastrophe which forced the surviving members into a new life as New Order, Touching From a Distance, the 1995 memoir by Curtis’s widow Deborah, complicated the narrative by describing a troubled epileptic who struggled to reconcile the demands and temptations of life in a fast-rising band with his responsibilities as a husband and father, but that acquired its own romantic sheen in Anton Corbijn’s biopic Control. Hook’s mission is to relate the chaotic day-to-day existence of four young men - kids, really - before it was smoothed into legend.

The demystification process starts with Hook’s portrayal of himself as a laddish delinquent who, thunderstruck by punk rock, spontaneously decides to form a band with Salford schoolfriend Bernard Sumner, and only develops his distinctively high, melodic bass-playing style to counteract the shortcomings of a cheap amp. Even as he lays bare Curtis’s juvenile side, Hook seems somewhat in awe of the singer: the charismatic highbrow with the arty Belgian girlfriend and the love of Ballard and Burroughs.

There’s a lovely image of Curtis in the studio, assembling his brutal, beautiful lyrics by rummaging through a carrier bag full of scraps of paper. Hook and Sumner are cast as comic relief, constantly overruled by belligerent producer Martin Hannett (“a lunatic wizard”) and forbidden from speaking in interviews by manager Rob Gretton. “He didn’t do it to create a mystique around the band but because he thought we were a couple of cretins.”

Despite the stream of earthy anecdotes, which includes Coronation Street’s Pat Phoenix, some frozen chickens and a “shit sandwich” (though not all at the same time), there’s a terrible sadness at the heart of the book. One reason is Hook’s enduring guilt about his friend’s suicide. He painfully accuses himself, Sumner and drummer Stephen Morris of “stupidity, wilful ignorance”. You might call it negligent optimism: an eagerness to accept Curtis’s upbeat denials of his suffering at face value.

And so the tragedy infects the farce, as Curtis’s ultimate fate casts ostensibly amusing on-the-road antics as symptoms of denial: never mind the worsening fits, let’s pelt the support band with eggs. Unable to save their friend, Joy Division’s survivors proved equally incapable of confronting their loss. Invited to view Curtis’s body lying in state, they opted instead for the pub.

There’s another layer of loss, because New Order reunited last year without their bitterly estranged bass player. Several asides hint at a sequel about that band: in the most 1980s sentence you will read all year, Hook claims that he was introduced to cocaine by OMD at the premiere of Pretty in Pink. He admits that his friendship with Sumner had cooled even during Joy Division’s lifetime, and that Insight, his favourite Joy Division song, “reminds me of a time when writing music was easy but most of all fun”, implying that, for him, New Order records were neither.

Hook believes Curtis’s death robbed his bandmates of the “glue that held us together” and Rob Gretton’s death in 1999 “left nobody” in that role. “Joy Division and then New Order were ships that needed captains, but our captains kept on dying on us,” Hook writes. Now New Order sail on without him, leaving him alone to trawl through the wreckage of the past, searching for clues as to what went wrong.

Dorian Lynskey is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute (Faber). To buy Unknown Pleasures for £14 with free UK pBp call 0330 333 6847 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk