Free Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook

time so wasn’t even there, somehow found out and demanded Terry be sacked for it. I wouldn’t mind but American E is shit anyway; it wasn’t worth moaning about, especially with the amount we were earning then – something like a million dollars per gig with merchandizing – and we were carrying ounces of coke! Me and Rob told Barney to fuck off and he stormed out after the gig.
    So anyway, by 1989 Barney had had enough of him. They hated each other. The Barney-and-Terry hate was even more intense than the me-and-Barney hate – and Barney threatened to leave New Order many times if Terry didn’t go. Eventually Terry moved to Los Angeles. With the advent of technology he reckoned he could work from anywhere so why not somewhere sunny? Thirteen years he’d worked with us by this point: through thick and thin, a loyal colleague and friend – still is, hopefully.
    I mean, the trouble was that he started off as our lead singer and went right down the ladder, or up the ladder, all the way to the bottom or the top depending on how you think. It was actually Terry who discovered distortion for us. Ian had a small WEM amp and two columns of ten-inch speakers he used for his vocals. Terry didn’t have an amp that day so plugged in to the WEM while Ian wasn’t singing . . . Oh my God, it sounded like choirs of angels, distorted choirs of angels: heavenly. Barney elbowed him out of the way immediately, saying, ‘You and Ian use mine!’
    Barney discovered distortion.
    Still, things certainly improved and we started practising more regularly at night, often going straight from work. I was working at the Ship Canal; Ian was working at the Employment Exchange in Macclesfield and Barney was at Cosgrove Hall Films helping to make cartoons for ITV. His job was to colour them in, although he used to tell the girls he was a graphic artist. It was a cool place to work, actually, much more relaxed than the Town Hall. They let us practice there in the early days; it was one of the many places we used when we pinged around from place to place. It used to be very difficult to find rehearsal rooms. Every pub you’d go in you’d say, ‘We’re a band and we’re just looking for a rehearsal room.’
    And they’d say, ‘Oh right. Why don’t you rehearse in the main room and you can play your songs and the punters will love it.’
    Which sounded horrific to us. ‘Oh no, you wouldn’t like us . . .’
    So we got a lot of offers but not many that were suitable, and we ended up shuttling around: the Albert pub in Macclesfield; Bernard’s gran’s front room; the Swan in Salford, which the landlady let us use for free if we bought a pie and a pint; disused mills and warehouses all over the place, where we used to go and drag gear up and down stairs then set up and play in the freezing cold. None of them were fully fledgedrehearsal rooms apart from the Big Alex, where twelve bands practised at once and you couldn’t concentrate because it was like being in an engine room. You’d have a reggae band going on, a heavy-metal band sawing away. To try to compete, Ian had to go and buy himself the WEM PA system.
    Up till then he’d just been hollering, which didn’t bother us because it sounded like the Sex Pistols, which is what we aspired to: that volume and attitude. Our first songs were like that, all just punk-copy songs. We had one called ‘BL’ – bleedin’ ‘ell – which was about Danny Lee’s sister Belinda, who I went out with and who broke my heart. I wrote it and Ian used to sing it, God bless him. I wrote ‘At a Later Date’ and ‘Novelty’, too – I was writing a lot of lyrics at work because I was bored. I could get rid of the whole month’s work in a week, so all I had to do for the other three weeks was go up and down the canal collecting the rent, piss about, fall asleep in the file room and write lyrics. Most of them were terrible but Ian was so nice and gracious like that he used to sing them anyway. Then