Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook Page A

home.
    Teaching myself meant I ended up learning it wrong, though, because I picked up the bad habit of playing with three fingers. A teacher would have made me play with four, but the Palmer-Hughes
Book of Rock ‘n’ Roll Bass Guitar
didn’t talk back so I started off – and have ended up – a three-fingered bass player; and having to hold down my little finger as I play makes me slower. Saying that, I suppose it also gave me my style, which is slower and more melodic compared to most bassists’. It’s a different way of playing, and it came through learning badly.
    We began by practising in Barney’s gran’s front room. I told you she was a lovely lady. She had an old stereogram record player, and Barney, who was always good with electronics, wired up our guitar leads to the two input wires on the needle cartridge so we could play through it. It worked as well. I mean, it sounded fucking diabolical, and if we both played at the same time you couldn’t hear anything but a wall of noise, but it worked. So we’d made it, we’d arrived – right up until his gran discovered that we’d wrecked her stereo and went berserk and threw us out. Then we ran down Alfred Street laughing.
    But we didn’t care. We were punks. We raided Oxfam and cut up the clothes we stole; I spiked up my hair and took the dog collar off the dog to wear. My mam went mad yet again. At first we were just copying the look from
Melody Maker
and
NME
, and wearing what the London punks were wearing, but pretty soon we were developing our own style. Barney discovered the Scout shop on New Mount Street and started wearing a more military look (typical of him, he wanted to be a neat-and-tidy punk) while I used masking tape on my blue blazer to put stripes on it, and we both sprayed prison arrows on our clothes.
    You used to get shouted at in the street for dressing like that; you were given the right leper treatment. I mean, these days nobody would bat an eyelid, but back then it was really shocking to see these kids walking round with hair in spikes and their clothes cut up. Which was, of course, why we did it – we wanted to be shocking; we wanted people staring at us. We loved that our mums hated it and that we had to get changed on the bus. It was all part of being a punk.
    This was it for us: we’d get the guitars out, play around for a bit, go out so that people in the street could treat us like lepers, then come back and play around on the guitars some more. It was great.
    The next punk happening in Manchester was the Pistols’ second gig, on 20 July, also at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Apart from the venue it was completely different: for a start, we were punks now and knew what to expect from the band; plus there were a lot more people there, not only because the word had spread in Manchester but also because the Pistols, unless I’m very much mistaken, had brought a coachload with them, which was exciting straight away. At that time if you put a group of Cockneys and a group of Mancs into a municipal building at the same time, a fight was bound to break out – which it did.
    We were in the bar talking to these kids who were from Manchester. They’d come over to us, one of them going, ‘Hey, are you fucking Cockneys or what?’ all up in our faces.
    And we went, ‘No, fuck off, mate, we’re from Salford.’
    ‘Oh, right. Well, we’re from Wythenshawe. We’re a group.’
    ‘Oh, right. We’re a group, too. Sort of.’
    ‘Well, we’re Slaughter & the Dogs. We’re supporting tonight.’
    Wow – it was Slaughter & the Dogs; and this bloke’s name was Mick Rossi, the guitarist. Slaughter & the Dogs were one of the earliest punkbands in Manchester – it was them and the Buzzcocks, who were also playing that night.
    ‘What’s your group called?’ said Mick Rossi.
    We looked at each other. ‘Dunno. We haven’t got a name yet.’
    Didn’t have a name. Didn’t have songs. Didn’t have a lead singer unless you counted Terry,