Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook

and more.
    And, God bless him, whatever he had, he gave a bit of it to us, because that was the second thing I felt, after
I can do that
. It was:
I
want
to do that
. No .
I fucking
need
to do that.
    Tony Wilson said he was there, of course, but I didn’t see him, which is weird because he was very famous in Manchester then; he was Tony Wilson off the telly. Mick Hucknall was there, and Mark E. Smith and everyone, but of course we didn’t know anybody – all that would come later. The only people we knew there were each other: me and Terry, Barney and Sue. I don’t know what Sue made of it all, mind you; I’d love to know now. But me, Barney and Terry were being converted.
    The Pistols were on for only about half an hour and when they finished we filed out quietly with our minds blown, absolutely utterly speechless, and it just sort of dawned on me then – that was it. That was what I wanted to do: tell everyone to Fuck Off.

‘Is that a bass guitar?’
    On the way home that night we decided to form a band. If they can do it, we said, meaning the Pistols, then so can we.
    We decided to follow the rules of punk . . .
    Rule one: act like the Sex Pistols.
Rule two: look like the Sex Pistols. One guitar, one bass.
    Terry volunteered to be the singer. Barney had been given a guitar and a little red practice amp for Christmas, which made him the guitarist, so I thought, ‘Right, I’ll get a bass.’
    Of course I’m pleased it worked out like that because I ended up learning the bass guitar, really making it my own and developing a very distinctive style, whereas (who knows?) if I’d tried learning the guitar I might just have been a bog-standard rhythm guitarist. It’s one of the strange things about writing a book like this, actually. You start seeing your life as series of chance happenings that somehow come together to make you what you are. You start thinking,
What if I hadn’t come back from Jamaica? What if I hadn’t bought that week’s
Melody Maker
or seen the advert for the Sex Pistols in the
Manchester Evening News
? What if Barney’s parents had bought him a Johnny Seven for his birthday instead of a guitar.
    But they didn’t. They bought him a guitar so I became a bassist. The very next day I borrowed £40 off my mam, and got the bus to Mazel’s on London Road, Piccadilly, in Manchester. I had no idea how much guitars cost. But I think Barney’s was about £40. Mazel Radio was one of those shops that always felt dark, it was that filled with weird indecipherable stock. (I used to go there with Terry for fun most weekends.) It was an Aladdin’s cave stuffed with transistors, valves, accumulators, TVs, radios – all kinds of electrical doo-dahs.
    And cheap guitars.
    ‘Can I have one of those, please?’ I said, pointing at them.
    ‘Well, what kind do you want, son?’ said the bloke behind the counter.
    ‘A bass one.’
    And he went, ‘Well, how about this one?’
    ‘Is that a bass guitar?
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘That’ll do.’
    So I bought my first guitar, which I’ve still got: a Gibson EB-0 copy. No make on it. They tried to sell me a case but after bus fare I didn’t have enough money so I took it home in a black bin liner they fished out from behind the counter. Very punk.
    Barney had been playing a bit so he showed me a couple of notes. He’d go, ‘Hold your finger there then move your finger to there. Move your finger back . . .’
    We were off. Not long later, we got books on how to play: the Palmer-Hughes
Book of Rock ‘n’ Roll Guitar
and
Rock ‘n’ Roll Bass Guitar
. Mine came with stickers for the neck of the bass so you knew where to put your fingers. When the stickers wore off with sweat, I painted them on with Tippex. We’d be sitting round practising, with Barney shouting out the chords, like, ‘Play A, A, A, A, and then we’ll change to G, G, G, G.’ I’d practise by myself, too, but it was far more interesting learning together than it was playing on your own at