Steven & Gillian
S: I were born and raised in Macclesfield (sic). Pretty boring really.
G: I was born in Whalley Range, and moved to Macclesfield when I was three. It was pretty boring, but I wouldn’t live anywhere else now.
S: We used to live on the same road, and we never met. In fact the same road that Debby lives on now.
G: I was at 61, where my parents still live now, and he was at -
S: 122. Our number used to be 61 before they built the new houses.
We used to go down to the Traveller’s Rest… Debby’s husband used to be in this heavy metal group, we used to see them. He used to wear capes. Didn’t she mention this?
It’s a museum, now, a Heritage centre.
You didn’t know Ian when you were growing up?
S: Ian was a year or two above me at King’s School. He remembered me, cos me and a couple of chums got kicked out, and the older boys were advised to go around checking the other pupils’ pupils. I fell in with a bad crowd. It was cough medicine. Had codeine in it. Unfortunately when instead of being full of schoolbooks, your desk is full of empty cough medicine bottles, excuses didn’t wash. One of the other lads had some acid, and we made the enlightened decision of telling his parents. This didn’t go down well, and the police were summoned, and we were suspended indefinitely.
I saw her picture in the paper: three girls want to form a punk group. It was full page news in the Macc Express!
S: I’d had this drum kit for some time, and I first heard of Warsaw as they were then, in Shitehawk fanzine. There were two bands after drummers at the same time: Warsaw and The Fall. I thought no more of it, and one day I saw a notice in a music shop window: Drummer wanted, Warsaw, and a Macclesfield phone number, so I rang it up, and it was Ian…
What was Ian like when you went around there?
I’d just given up smoking, two months, and the first thing he did was give me a Marlboro, really insisted, and I’ve never stopped smoking since. He was a really nice, jovial sort of character. With his Dansette. The house was divided into two areas, one where he and Debbie could sit and watch telly, and Ian had his own little room on the left with his dansette and his records…
They’d all been going for a bit. I think the first night I did with them was the last night at the Electric Circus. Or was there one before that? There must have been.
We’d do these long, rambling jam things, and Ian would just sit in a corner with his book of words, and he’d try out some of the words that he’d written.
So he had all the words already?
Yeah, and that was a big difference between New Order and Joy Division. Ian would come out with words and immediately it sounded less like a rambling jam and more like a song. In the course of an afternoon we could come up with a song or two, cos he had so many lyrics.
Did he ever talk about where the lyrics came from?
He was pretty private about what he wrote. I think he talked to Bernie a bit about some of the songs. He was totally different to how he appeared on stage. He was timid, until he’d had two or three Breakers, malt liquor. He’d liven up a bit.
The first time I saw Ian being Ian onstage, I couldn’t believe it. The transformation to this frantic windmill. It could have been Eric’s, or Pip’s.
He wanted to be Iggy. He used to go on about his mate who used to play Fun House all the time…
How important was Martin?
In the sound of the records, very important, although we always felt that he made us sound different to how we were live. I always thought he had a sort of West Coast, Elektra kind of feel, and we were quite thrashy.
When did you first feel you were doing something right?
Going back a bit, the Factory Sampler, Digital & Glass. They were trying to do a rock-disco crossover, but it didn’t end up sounding like that. They were both written in the same week. But that was the end of the stuff that Warsaw did.
When did you notice that something was wrong with Ian?
The first time he had a fit, which I think was after we played the Nashville. We’d been really impressed cos we went outside, and there was a chippy. I think that was the night we met Peter Savile. But Ian was in a really obnoxious mood with everybody, and on the drive back he started writhing about. I thought he was just messing about, and then we thought we’d better stop, cos he was having a fit.
I think it affected Ian in a really bad way, because they put him on heavy tranquillisers, and the doctor told him the only way he could minimise the risk was by leading a really normal, regular life, which by that time wasn’t something he wanted to do. He liked to jump around onstage, and he liked to get pissed.
Did he change then?
Yeah, he did. The first time I saw that side of him, was one night we were trying to get into the Electric Circus, to see the Stranglers, and he just sort of ran off, and the next time I saw him he had his tongue down this girl’s throat. Very bizarre. He used to go a bit wild.
He didn’t like being told he couldn’t do that anymore, it was one of the reasons he got into the band in the first place.
Was Deborah kept out of the way?
Girlfriends didn’t go to the gigs.
G: Only in Manchester. I used to come to some of the others, but it caused ructions. Debby used to drive Ian to some of the gigs, didn’t she?
S: But Ian had tried to persuade her not to.
I don’t think he really knew what he wanted. About a month before his first suicide attempt, he told me on the phone he was packing in the group and him & Debby were going to go off and live in Holland, and open a bookshop. Which really surprised me.
When we played at Plan K in Belgium, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin were signing copies of The Third Mind, and Ian went up to Burroughs and said, ere, you got any copies of this book in English then? Burroughs was rather bemused. They only had them in Flemish, Belgian. I think Ian got one, anyway, in case he ever learned to speak Belgian.
I think Anique refined his intellectualism. She was a journalist from a well-off family, and when he was with her, he’d change again. She made him think he was an Artist…
G: I noticed that….
It was just after Unknown Pleasures, Transmission, that it started getting manifest.
Do you remember the Leigh festival?
Yes. Factory meets Zoo half way. And nobody else.
What did you think about that first suicisde attempt, where he slashed the bible?
He said he didn’t remember anything about it. That he had a blackout, which I can believe to a certain extent. But it’s more likely that he just got pissed and vented his frustration…
Then he tried again with barbiturates?
Yeah. The stuff he was taking anyway was pretty heavy. I went on a course of antidepressants, and that was mild compared to… he was on largactils. It must have been horrible. He was having more and more fits, and it was more concentrated, wasn’t it?
Did he have any fits on stage?
Oh yeah. That was the good thing about Interzone, cos Hooky could sing it. If Ian had a fit, we could drag him off stage and do Interzone.
G: it was so strange, himbeing ill, and having to… it’s horrible.
What I find weird was that he was so ill and havinbg these fits and yet nobody said to him, stop it, don’t turn up to the gig. Nobody said.
G: When he died, Steve said, oh we’re not going to America. I don’t know whether it was shock, or what.
S: After the first suicide thing, before that gig in Bury, I remember saying to Rob, cos it was a Saturday and the gig was on a Monday, that we ought to pull it, and Rob got really angry about it. I was really shocked when we did that. Also when he said he wanted to go and live in Holland and do a book shop, it was us that persuaded him not to. Again, he’d been very pliable. If he’d stuck to what he wanted, he’d probably still be alive today.
The one at the Moonlight was after we’d done two gigs in one night, we’d done the Rainbow, then we went and did the Moonlight…
The one that I remember being most shocked by was Eric’s. The dressing room was right at the side of the stage, and Terry caught him & took him off, and you could see him having the fit off the side of the stgae. I think that was ’79.
There was one on the Buzzcocks tour, at Bournemouth, which was a really bad one. It was just after we came off, and we had to take him to hospital.
It’s a lot to have to deal with.
Yeah.
So did you just have to try to carry on?
Yeah.. I understand a lot more about epilepsy now than I did then. I knew a couple of lads who were epil;eptic, and they’d just have one once a year, but they used to just pass out, with Ian it was the full-blown grand mal. One of the plus points for him was it put him on a par with Dosteovsky…
I never knew Neil Young was epileptic, but he manages to get away with it. I’ve come to notice they have a certain look about them. A girl who’s doing a book about epilepsy came up to us on the train about it… Richard Jobson’s one as well, isn’t he?
Where did Ian used to get his clothes?
From that shop on Piccadilly, I remember Rob taking us there and buying us some stage clothes. Whenever we went to buy clothes, Ian always wanted shoes. We were always happy with a pair of keks and a shirt, but Ian would forego that for a pair of shoes. He’s go around everywhere, every shoe shop in London, after these ridiculous winkle-pickers.
What none of us really understood at the time, Ian was married and he was the first one to give up his job… I remember an absolutely horrendous argument between him and Rob, about money. The rest of us were still working, but we could get time off, and Ian couldn’t anymore. So we became a little resentful about him getting more money than us…
When did you first play with them, Gillian? Was that towards the end?
S: it was another gig at Eric’s wasn’t it, before Europe. Was it the one where Margox was on? I think so. The other gigs we’d done at Erics had been that Saturday thing, there was a matinee, with two bands on, and ended up that the support band for the matinee ended up headlining, which upset the Rich Kids, and Brian James’s band Tanz der Youth. They didn’t like that at all.
He was never very keen on pl;aying guitar, you see. Even though the guitar riff on Day of the Lords was something he came up with from taking the guitar home, trying to learn how to play it…
So there were five of you onstage?
Yeah, just for one number. Just for I Remember Nothing.
Did you know what was happening during the last month?
We knew when he was in hospital… he’d left Debbie, and he stayed with Tony and with Bernard, and when he did that he was out of Macclesfield, and you didn’t really know what was going on.
The day he died, which was on the Saturday, we’d been out to the park, which was just across the road from where he was in the hospital…
G: they were going to America on the Monday, and he’d been saying he’d had this dream about a squirrel, jumping out of his case.
There was obviously no indication that he was going to do it…
Well, after the first attempt, you thought, if he really wanted to do it, he’d have done it. It must just be a cry for help. That’s what I thought. I thoiught, he might have had another half-hearted attempt, but I didn;’t think he was one hundred percent fed up with it all. Whatever it was, I don’t know, but I didn’t think he’d go all the way.
You think it was a spur of the moment thing?
I don’t know. I was shocked when I first heard, but then I thought, it was probably an accident, knowing him. Maybe he didn’t mean to do it… but I think he did.
Do you think he was worried about going to the States?
A bit, cos someone had told him that they don’t like epileptics in the States. It isn’t true, but I know someone had told him that. Apart from that, I think he was looking forward to actually going to America. He was up for it. Chelsea Hotel.
That Richard Serling record, cos he had a deal with TK records in Miami, and Ian thought, wouldn’t it be good if it just came out in America, and it didn’t come out over here?
Are you ever going to put that out?
I don’t think so, no. There is some stuff that might come out, which is the stuff we did with Martin Rushent.
I think you could do a better job of re-sequencing the stuff on Substance and Still, make a good package of all that.
One of the things that bothers me about London… its probably me being set in my ways, but they want to do this compilation with Joy Division and New Order on the same record, which I think is a bit tacky…
What was the last thing you did as Joy Division? Did you start work on Ceremony?
Yeah. Ceremony and In A Lonely Place were the last two songs that we did. God knows if they’re the right lyrics. We couldn’t make them out, all we had was a really naff rehearsal tape of it. That was pretty weird, listening to all the old tapes.
Have you done that recently?
Not recently, no. When we did Substance…
How long did it take you to get over Ian’s death…
G: It carried on and on, didn’t it?
S: I don’t think you notice the day when you get over it. I remember dreaming about him… I had a dream about him just before we did Republic. Telling us not to be cruel, which I thought was really odd. Driving this Cortina. He used to lie down in the back and this hand would come round, and there was a Marlboro for you. Used to make me jump.
Do you think there was a sense of him that carried on into New Order?
At first, yeah. Movement was a really horrible record to make. We said we had to carry on, but it was a real struggle. The tone of it wasn’t exactly up.
I didn’t like it until I heard it on CD. I couldn’t listen to it for ages. Doing Movement was hard because Martin, in a way, took Ian’s death harder than we did. He took it really badly, I don’t know why. He was very emotional about doing Movement, as though he didn’t really want to do it.
The first thing I thought after he died, was it’s going to be like another Jimi Hendrix and all that lot. You’re going to have people coming round saying, what was he like. Which didn’t happen as much as I thought it was going to. But I didn’t expect it to affect Martin that much…
Do you think Ian came out onstage and gave everything?
I think that’s about right. That was the beginning of the end, because he couldn’t do without being in a band, and he couldn’t pretend. Because of that, he would be drained.
G: you start thinking if it’s worth it…
S: The thought never crossed your mind whether it was worth it or not. I just couldn’t imagine him not doing that.