Free Touching From a Distance by Deborah Curtis

and became great friends. As the punk era arrived, they began looking for a singer for their band. Numerous odd-balls answered Bernard and Terry’s advertisement in Virgin Records, the most odd being a hippie who was dressed in what was clearly an old tasselled cushion cover. Danny Lee, a friend of Peter Hook, was said to be able to ‘out-Billy Idol’ Billy Idol, but he never actually managed to get up and sing. When Ian rang Bernard Sumner’s number, Bernard remembered bumping into Ian at local gigs and made a snap recruitment decision. He told Ian there and then that he could be in the group.

    ‘Because I knew he was all right to get on with and that’s what we based the whole group on. If we liked someone, they were in.’
    Bernard Sumner
    This left Iain Gray very much on his own. He must have felt rejected as he vented his bitter feelings on me at one of the last nights at the Electric Circus gigs. His rude verbal abuse offended me, but as he didn’t touch me physically I didn’t care. All I wanted was success for Ian and, at the time, the number of casualties was unimportant. Also Iain’s attitude was a little unfair.
    ‘Ian didn’t want to let Iain down, so I think he waited until Iain got fed up and left before he joined us. ‘Cause Ian was as soft as shit, wasn’t he?’
    Peter Hook
    To determine whether Ian really could fit in with the rest of the lads, Bernard arranged a ‘getting to know him’ session. This involved an outing to Ashfield Valley near Rochdale. He found a soul-mate in Terry Mason. They had both spent a large portion of their lives avidly reading the music press and waiting in record shops, hoping to be the first to buy each new release. They saw music as the main ingredient in life and believed everything the music press said. Ian in particular revelled in the tortured lives depicted in the songs of the Velvet Underground; any music which didn’t demonstrate a certain sadness, violence, or perhaps a struggle against impossible odds, was dismissed.
    I decided to take driving lessons and even though Ian had no wish to drive himself, he was very supportive. I enrolled at a school near his parents’ house so Ian could visit them while I was having my lesson. I had no car of my own and there was no one to take me for a drive in between the one-hour lessons each week. One night my instructor directed me to drive down a deserted back street in the middle of Manchester and I found myself on a piece of wasteland behind a derelict mill. Luckily the look on my face was enough to tellhim he had made a mistake. Not wanting to tell Ian what had happened, I carried on taking driving tuition from the same man until the day I failed my test. Ian was wonderful when he heard of my failure. I think at that time, if I’d committed murder he would have stood by me. His loyalty made him very stubborn and he was loath to admit that I didn’t yet have the experience to pass the test.
    The house in Barton Street, Macclesfield, was exactly what we had been searching for. It was double fronted and stood on a bend in the road. With a front door and staircase in the centre and a living room on either side, it was considerably larger than the neighbouring homes. The room on the left seemed as though it had been built to fit around the bend in the road and was almost triangular in shape. Eventually, this was to be Ian’s song-writing room, just as he had always wanted.
    The kitchen was compact and there wasn’t a great deal of room in the shared yard for a washing line, so Mrs Moody had an old-fashioned clothes rack in the kitchen. It wound up to the ceiling on a little pulley, just like the one Ian’s grandmother kept. As the Moodys would be taking it with them, Ian resolved to scrounge his grandparents’ identical clothes rack for our own use.
    On a snowy day in May 1977 we moved back to Macclesfield, or rather I did, as Ian was ‘unable to get time off work’. By now I had become suspicious as to why Ian