Joy Division singer Ian Curtis died 40 years ago today. Read a detailed account of the band's earliest days
I went to work at the town hall. Because I didn’t feel I was cut out for it, I had to have myriad distractions while I was working, and basically it was reading. I used to read all the music papers from cover to cover, and I became one of the kids waiting for them to come in on a Wednesday morning. What happened with the Sex Pistols was that somehow the whole thing leapt out, because it was unusual after reading about heavy-metal bands for so long.
Peter Hook, Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner performing live onstage at Bowdon Vale Youth Club, 1979. Photo credit: Martin O’Neill/Redferns/Getty ImagesHow to Play the Guitar. We went to my grandmother’s parlor, which was just across the Irwell. I remember we didn’t have any amps. She had an old gramophone from the Forties, and I took the needle out of it and wired two jack sockets on it.
When the Sex Pistols turned up, that’s when it went a little bit bizarre. They were queasy in the way they looked: not so much the four members of the group but their entourage, hanging off the side of the stage, this weird combination of bondage get-up dwarves out of some weird Thirties horror movie,The Pistols themselves didn’t look that far removed from the Faces, to be honest.
It was like some disaster area, and there was hardly anywhere to go. There was no one to see. Something had happened. All the bands that would have filled medium-sized halls had gone, and then you just had really crap imitations and the few pubs that put anything on. It was a challenge because Manchester had a spirit which was in the place and in the people, but hadn’t been energized.By the time we did the second show on July 20th, we had managed to get a bass player and a drummer.
The Sex Pistols had actually gotten a lot better. I think it was that night the first time I heard them play “Anarchy in the U.K.,” and from the moment it started it was like a frisson of hearing something which is really a landmark. It was like opening the door and a herd of elephants rushing in.
In August of ’76, after we played at the Lesser Free Trade Hall with the Sex Pistols, we went to see Foo Foo at his massage parlor and sauna. He came in for this meeting and he was wearing a towel around his shoulder, so it was very Seventies gangster type, more like a scene out ofthan anything else me and Howard were used to. We said, “We’d like to put on a gig at your club.” He listened to us and thought we were a bit weird, but said yes, it was a good idea.
At these places the guys looked exactly like me in a way — especially after I’d had my hair cut short — and they were wearing their granddad’s clothes, as if this was our fashion statement because it was all we could muster.
Then Ian walked in, and he was a really sweet, nice person. You’d look at him and you’d think, “Christ, quite a frightening-looking guy”: leather pants, this combat jacket with “hate” on the back — a bit like De Niro in, because I know he was really into that film. I remember talking that night, and he seemed a lot older and more mature. I was 18 at the time, and Ian would have been about 20, 21. And I was going like, “The punk ideals, Ian. Being married —boring.
We decided we’d go to London about two weeks after we’d met, just to see what was happening there. We did the King’s Road: We went into Sex, Malcolm McLaren’s shop, and we went into the Roebuck. Didn’t see any of the Pistols, although we were hoping we’d bump into them. We bumped into Gene October, who played with Chelsea, and we were going to get a gig for them in Manchester and we’d play with them.
Around that time we met a bass player. We were just jamming at the time. We played in the Great Western pub in Moss Side, where we rehearsed. I’d phoned up and said, “Could we play there?” We set up in this pub, and all these locals in a really rough working-class pub are really staring at us. Ian’s there with his jacket and screaming away, and they chucked us out — “Get out!” Ian hadn’t really developed his singing voice.
We tried within our circles for a singer, one of them being a guy called Danny Lee, who was a friend of Hooky’s. Danny was fantastic, he looked more like Billy Idol than Billy Idol ever has done — he had the lip going, the sneer — and he thought he was ready to sing, but never did. So then we decided that we’d have to talk to other people, which was new to us — we were quiet and shy people — so we put up the advert in Virgin and we had a few responses.
It was obvious that this guy was serious. He was prepared for it and he didn’t scare us, so we decided to see if we’d like him. So Ian’s audition as such was we invited him to come out with us one Sunday afternoon, and we went to Ashworth Valley, in Rochdale. Basically, we spent a couple of hours just acting like kids, throwing bits of wood into streams and jumping over them. On reflection, it wasn’t a bad audition technique. It worked.
The first set of material we wrote was just us aping punk, completely aping it and doing it really badly. We were the musical equivalent of nine-year-old kids, so we wrote about seven songs. We got pally with the Buzzcocks, and they were really helpful to us. They helped us get gigs. Pete Shelley sent Richard Boon down to see us, and he came and we were playing, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, fuck off, fuck off, yeah, yeah, yeah, bollocks, bollocks” — these really dreadful, dreadful songs.
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