Read Online Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook - Free Book Online

there was a balcony in the Electric Circus.
    Even before the Pistols played there the Circus was a big punk venue; and because there was only that and the Ranch, which was a punk club on Thursday nights, you got to start recognizing all the punks because they were going to the same two places on the same nights. The people who stuck out tended to be the well-known ones, like the Buzzcocks and Slaughter & the Dogs, or the guys with big personalities – people like John the Postman, the noisy bastard. Me and Barney were pretty quiet. We’d just stand on the side-lines and not get noticed, but you’d see the faces and you’d let on. ‘All right, mate, how are you?’ something like that. People got to know you.
    The night of that third Pistols gig there was a really livelyatmosphere, to say the least. You’ve got to bear in mind that this was 9 December 1976, a week or so after the Pistols had done their
Today
-programme interview, when they’d gone on teatime TV and told Bill Grundy he was a ‘fucking rotter’. Next day it was all over the papers – ‘The Filth and the Fury!’ – and suddenly the Pistols were public enemy number one. They were about to go on their Anarchy tour with the Damned (who ended up getting thrown off it, for some reason), the Clash and Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, and because of the outcry most of the gigs were cancelled. Seventeen of the twenty-four dates were stopped by local councils. Among those that went ahead were two at the Electric Circus, and consequently a lot more people came along. The place was fucking rammed.
    Even so, we recognized Ian. He stood out. Me and Barney were at the top of some stairs looking down and he came up the stairs with his donkey jacket on and we got talking to him because we’d seen him around. What were our first words to him? Fucked if I can remember. ‘Didn’t I see you at the Squat?’ something like that. I’m not sure we even found out his name that night, to be honest. He was just a kid with ‘Hate’ on his coat, just a normal kid. Of course, we were all punks, so we must have looked pretty wild compared to everybody else but he looked normal compared to us. He was nice. Softly spoken. Sharp sense of humour. Of the two portrayals of him on film, I prefer the one in
24 Hour Party People
. The guy in
Control
, Sam Riley, played him as being much more arty and conventionally pretty than he was in real life, whereas Sean Harris in
24 Hour Party People
had a bit more of the real-life Ian’s edginess and intensity. Neither were perfect and neither were totally off the mark, but for my money Harris was the more accurate.
    It was at that same Pistols gig that we spoke to a guy from
Sounds
, who quoted us in his report of the gig – our very first national write-up.
    The sentiments [that the Pistols were great] were echoed by most every kid I spoke to – they were certainly all in the process of forming bands. Stiff Kittens (Hooky, Terry, Wroey and Bernard, who has the final word) being the most grotesque offering.
    Pete Silverton,
Sounds
, 18 December 1976
    ‘Grotesque’, eh? Cheers, mate. Wroey was someone Barney had met in Broughton, a friend of his cousin Grimmie. We were trying him out as singer at the time, which is why he got a mention in
Sounds
. Like most of our singers he didn’t last and we added him to a growing pile of rejects. The problem wasn’t that they were terrible as such, just that they were the wrong sort of terrible. I mean, we just needed someone to sound horrible and shit – we were a punk band after all – but they weren’t right for it. For some reason they couldn’t do proper singing or horrible and shit singing, just awful singing, but not in a good way. I suppose it’s one of those star-quality things. You recognize it when you see it.
    Our search was taking too long. So we decided to advertise for a singer with a notice on the board in Virgin Records in Piccadilly, and in response got the biggest bunch