Free Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook Page B

touch with Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks. (I can’t remember how – he must have given us his phone number.) We met him in a pub in Broughton where we picked his brains. We were a bit star-struck, a bit in awe of him because he was in a band and they were like Manchester punk royalty, but mainly we were just pleased that he’d agreed to see us, because in those days there were no books on starting a band. You couldn’t go on a course or look it up on the Internet. Being in a group gave you instant social-leper status. It meant you were ostracized byyour family and shunned by passing strangers in the street, and your workmates made no bones about what they thought of it all.
    ‘Why do you want to be in a group? Fuck off, do some work why don’t you?’
    So to actually talk to someone with first-hand experience was very valuable. And, though the Manchester punk scene would go on to resemble a snake-pit of petty jealousy, backbiting and rivalry, the Buzzcocks and especially Pete seemed above all that. Right from the word go they were about being inclusive – the proper punk ethos. It was just the rest of us who squabbled like kids over a bag of sweets.
    Because we’d met up with Pete, and because Pete was a nice, gracious guy, he’d ask me and Bernard how it was going. We told him that Ian was really working out as a lead singer, which was good because Pete knew Ian, too, and Pete asked us if we’d like a support slot with the Buzzcocks, and even though we still didn’t have a name that we all liked, and we were ‘between drummers’, we virtually bit his hand off. This was it. This was what we were getting ready for.
    The first thing we did was work on the look. I went shopping with Terry at the Army & Navy Store on Tib Street, where a black plastic cap set me back 50p.
    ‘You have to have a gimmick, our Peter,’ as my mother always said. These were probably her only words of advice about the band other than, ‘You should give it all up and settle down.’ (I remember once arriving late for my Sunday lunch at home because I’d been doing an interview for the
NME
in town. When I told her I thought she’d go mad: dinner was ruined. Instead she burst out crying, hugged me and said, ‘At last. You’re getting a proper job!’ That was in 1986.) But it wasn’t bad advice as it goes and that was my gimmick at first: the cap and a moustache. Terry, who by now was trying his hand at being our manager/roadie, got his tank commander’s goggles; Barney no doubt invested in a fresh supply of Scout clothes from the Scout shop, and of course Ian had his own Ian thing going on. One thing they got dead right in
Control
, actually, was how Ian looked. He didn’t go in for the jackboots (ex-German army, £3.50 a pair from Tib Street; wore them for years) or the tank hats or Scout stuff. He was just Ian, and he was always much cooler than us without really trying to be. Just was.
    Next we needed a new name, Stiff Kittens being too ‘London punk’. We chose Warsaw. Just like that. For any group the name’s your most important thing, definitely as important as the music, and I’ve always found it tough to choose one. But Warsaw was a piece of piss, far easier than any of the name changes that came later. We picked it because it was cold and austere. It was either that or Berlin, and because we all liked ‘Warszawa’, the track on Bowie’s
Low
, we chose that. Too late for Richard Boon, though: the Buzzcocks’ manager had been screaming at us for a name but by the time we eventually we came up with Warsaw it was too late, or so he said, and he’d gone with Stiff Kittens on the poster. This annoyed us and kind of led to us falling out with the Buzzcocks a bit – because we would have been very, well,
vocal
about our annoyance.
    But we still didn’t have a drummer. For a while it looked like we might have to cancel the gig or maybe even go back to the wet-towel kid, but in the end we got a guy called Tony Tabac, who