Stephen Morris; Joy Division, Ian Curtis, and more...

Archive interview from 2007.

Stephen Morris, drummer extraordinaire in Joy Division and New Order, is one my favourite interviewees. This interview took place on 28th September 2007 at XFM Manchester’s studios in Salford, around the time the film Control was about to be released, and some of it was used in an XFM podcast. It appears here in a lengthy, raw, unedited form.

In later interviews we returned a few times to his memories of the early Joy Division years and Ian’s death. One thing he’s often underlined to me is how Ian enjoyed so much in life: books, films, Marlboro cigarettes, and being in a band are just some examples. Oh, and Stephen has told me how much Ian loved cha siu bao and vermicelli at the Yang Sing in Manchester’s Chinatown.

Ian and Stephen would browse cult bookshops in Manchester; in the interview Stephen remembers that when Ian felt things closing in, he told him he was thinking of moving to Holland and opening a bookshop. There’s so much in what follows, about Joy Division coming together, rehearsing, recording and then arriving at such a heartbreaking end.

You were at the same school as Ian; were you aware of him before the band?

Well, yes. Ian and myself went to the Kings School in Macclesfield which is a grammar school.

And were you aware then of Ian as a character around school?

I must have been aware of him because he was a prefect and I’d be like the year under him so I’d be aware of him as somebody to avoid at all costs really as I went about my nefarious dry-cleaning fluid, glue sniffing activities, cough medicine swilling and all that lot. So if I did see him I either got out of the way or was oblivious to him.

So when you were at school you did a bit of kind of amateur medication?

Amateur chemistry? Yeah. I found acid quite a good way of getting through double English but not much else. When it was followed by games it was useless!

In Control - and I think it’s in a letter to Annik as well - Ian says that Macclesfield was somewhere that he spent his whole life trying to escape from. Why did he have that idea?

Everybody in Macclesfield at that time had the same thing. It’s like some sort of Colditz type town. We used to go down the pub and “Ey, I want to get out of ‘ere” and “Yeah, me? I’m off to Kathmandu” and you know you’d see them hitching on the road with their kaftans on and their sleeping bags and they’d get as far as Henbury and then come back because they were too pissed. Everybody wanted to get out of Macclesfield but it was just what you did. You know, you wanted to get down to London where it all happened. It was a grim place; grimmer even than Manchester and that was quite grim at the time! All there was for entertainment was the pubs and if you were lucky you’d find a pub with a jukebox.

I’ve read that you saw an advert for the drummer’s job in a music store in Macclesfield.

Yeah, what happened was while I was at King School me and a couple of lads formed this band. We were called The Sunshine Valley Dance Band and everybody who wants to be in a band wants to be the lead guitarist, so we were a band of half a dozen lead guitarists and so, being the most malleable, I said I’ll play the drums. I come from a musical family; my Dad managed groups and my uncle played lots on instruments. So what I’d been doing, I’d been drumming in my Dad’s bedroom. I wasn’t getting anywhere. The gigs weren’t coming in so I was walking past Jones’s Music Shop window and it says ‘Drummer wanted for local punk band Warsaw’ and I’d heard of Warsaw. I’d seen a similar advert; I remember I got a copy of ‘Shy Talk’ which was a fanzine at the time and there was two ‘Drummer wanted’ ads. ‘Drummer wanted for punk band The Fall’ and ‘Drummer wanted for local punk band Warsaw’ but I’d no idea where they were because ‘Shy Talk’ was from Manchester so when I saw ‘local punk band’ and a Macclesfield number I thought, that’s ok, I’ll give them a ring and that’s how I met Ian properly.

I went round to Ian’s house in Barton Street – which sounded a bit weird; being married and with a house in Barton Street – and he immediately re-introduced me to the evils of smoking and his Marlboro addiction was passed onto me. So, a couple of weeks went by and he sorted out somewhere to do a rehearsal. And we went off to the Abraham Moss Centre in Crumpsall and made a bit of a racket for a few hours. It seemed to go well and I don’t think Ian ever officially told me I’d got the job but I just hung around with them!

It was Hooky and Barney’s group originally but I think it seems like Ian was taking some of the decisions, taking the lead on things. How did that relationship work?

Well, it was really nobody’s group. We were kind of a punkocracy but Ian was not exactly taking the lead but he really wanted it to happen and he borrowed the money to go and record ‘An Ideal For Living’ as it became, and he’d already paid to record a demo before I joined. He wasn’t the leader, but he was pushing the thing along. He wasn’t “I think we should do this”. He’d say “What d’you think of this…” and when you say he’s a leader it makes it sound like it was…

The Fall?!

Alright, ok, it could so easily have been The Fall!

So, who did you replace in the band?

Who did I replace in the band? I think at the time Steve Brotherdale had just exploded or moved onto better things. He’d gone on to join V2. And God knows how many drummers there were before me. A revolving door!

Vini Reilly has said that he thought that one of the differences in Warsaw after you joined was that your drumming was much more interesting than the kind of usual punk bang-bang. Was that something you were aware of?

Yeah, I didn’t want to play like that; Rat Scabies did it very well and I thought I’d leave him to it. I had a different idea – if I had any idea at all – but it was definitely not to play like that.

Did you have a kind of role model or anything?

Everything you’d heard up until that point really but I was more into Kraut Rock and being a bit more metronomic about it. But the first lot of songs that they had hanging over from Warsaw were like very fast Kraut Rock with a bit of Velvet Underground. It would be “Play it like Velvet Underground”, so ‘Ice Age’ and stuff like that was like Maureen Tucker on speed. So, yes, I had ambitions to do other stuff.

And were there any cover versions – did the band regularly do cover versions?

Very badly! If you couldn’t write a song do a cover version! I suppose the most well known – or, maybe, not well known cover version – was after we ended up mistakenly signing ourselves to RCA via Derek Brandwood and Richard Searling. I suppose this was where Ian was taking a lead in things, going and hanging out at their office, and telling them about the band you know, and we ended up doing this record for the label. And they suggested that we did a cover version of this northern soul song, NF Porter’s ‘Keep on Keeping On’ which has got a great riff. It’s got a really great hook in it and instead of the cover version, it just became one of our songs – ‘Interzone’; but it had started life as a cover version ‘Keep on Keeping On’.

You sometimes did a cover version of ‘Sister Ray’ didn’t you, and it always seemed to go on a bit?

That was the whole thing about Sister Ray – it wasn’t really a cover version, it was an excuse for a jam around duh-duh, duh-duh-duh… and that was it. We could never agree on what key it was in and sometimes it was in two different keys.

In ‘No Love Lost’ when you recorded it in 1977, there’s that bit in the middle where Ian reads a bit out of The House of Dolls. Have you ever read the book?

No, we only had one copy and it just got passed between Ian and Bernard. I don’t know where the idea came from that this song would benefit from reading a bit out of a book which Ian happened to have. I mean maybe Ian thought it’d be a good idea to do – he just picked a bit at random and read it, a spur of the moment thing.

Around that moment when the name changed from Warsaw to Joy Division, can you remember the discussions that might have been had around that time?

Well, I worked for my Dad – which is always good because you can do what you want – and I was abusing my position of working for my Dad by pretending to be somebody who worked in the music business and was an agent for a group called Warsaw. So, I’d ring up and I got a few gigs for us that way and we tried to get a gig in London and I rang up this lady at some agency and I said “Oh, yeah we’ve done a lot of gigs in Manchester could you sort of get us a gig at The Elephant and Castle or somewhere like that?”. And she said “Oh, what you called?” So I said “Warsaw” and she “There’s no way on earth you’ll get a gig in London with a name that’s so similar to the Warsaw Pakt” who were an up-and-coming band who had just recorded an album. So, we were like, oh right, if we want to go and play London we can’t be called Warsaw because it’s too much like the Warsaw Pakt.

I can’t remember where Joy Division came from; I mean obviously it was from the book The House of Dolls so I would say considering that it was Bernard and Ian who were the two who read it, it would be one of them two I blame.

Obviously the name became controversial. But I remember around that time, there was a lot of hidden history wasn’t there and a lot of people were playing quite safe and there were a lot of taboos and stuff and to me the name was part of what was happening generally; to break through that safe thing, like a sort of explosive idea. You know; this is the name and it’s to do with something dark and violent but deal with it.

Yeah! There was a lot of that at the time and a lot of punk rock and new wave did have some kind of agenda other than music. There was a semi-political thing about it and a lot of groups were like that, but actually we weren’t like that; we were just a bunch of lads having a laugh really rather than having any pretensions of literacy even. You really had to have some sort of a manifesto to start a new wave group and you had to tick the right boxes and all that. And although, yeah you’re right, Joy Division is dark – the name is dark – and I do sound increasingly naive as this goes on, but I just thought “That’s a good name.”

When the Pop Group brought out ‘We Are All Prostitutes’ no-one was like hang on a minute – you’re offensive or oppressive or out of order and all that kind of stuff. Like you say, it was part of some sort of political manifesto wasn’t it?

Yeah, it was.

In the film 24 Hour Party People, there’s a moment when Martin Hannett puts you out on the fire escape and you’re left drumming away during the making of Unknown Pleasures.

Never happened, no! But it’s one of those things that encapsulates Martin’s relationship with the drummer; it didn’t happen but things like that did happen – just daft things – but that one scene didn’t happen and everybody remembers it. It does sum it up. In much the same way that in Control the actor who plays Rob answers the payphone in Y-fronts and that probably never happened but that kind of sums up Rob; that one scene says a lot about Rob which was true.

It’s said that when the band listened to what Martin had done for Unknown Pleasures, there was disappointment…

Yeah. I’ve got to say I wasn’t that disappointed with it, but Bernard and Peter were because their sound suffered the most, but I thought that he made the drums sound great. Ian was a bit critical but also it was the shock of hearing yourself recorded because we did the RCA record, which was basically just the songs as we played them live with no production work at all, and we thought with Martin the songs would sound a bit like that only better but they sounded completely different!

You see, I’d always had this thing in my head, that when you listen, there’s two different things, two different agendas about listening to music. When you listen to a record, you want one thing about it which is cerebral; it’s in your head, you want it to talk to you somehow. And when you went to see a band perform live you wanted the opposite of that; you wanted something that didn’t talk to your head, it talked to your heart and it was very physical. And I liked the way that what Martin was doing something completely different but, yes, you could say he was watering down the live sound but I thought it was good the way he was twisting it and turning it into something that was futuristic, definitely.

Ian Curtis’s handwritten lyrics for ‘Shadowplay’

And in terms of the lyrics that Ian was writing, did you talk to him about them?

No, we never talked about what we did at all. It was almost as if, if you analyse what you were doing and started thinking about it, then you’d break the spell and it wouldn’t work anymore. No, we never talked about his lyrics apart from saying “That’s good” because he’d turn up and he’d have his lyrics in a book and we’d just jam a riff and just keep playing it round and round and round. And he’d find something in his book and start singing over the top of it and we could write a song really quickly. I think the thing about Joy Division, was that Joy Division was something that only happened when we all got in a room and started playing. And the songs were what came out of that.

‘New Dawn Fades’, a song like that; when you listen back to it, when you’re outside of that, when you’ve done the jamming and he’s done the lyrics and he’s sung and it’s been recorded and you listen back, was there kind of a part of you that was thinking some of this is quite extreme?

No. I thought it was fantastic. ‘New Dawn Fades’ was kind of finished in the studio really and there’s a couple of them, like ‘Candidate’ just written in the studio. I can’t remember what we were doing, I think it might have been ‘Day of the Lords’ or something and we were just sound checking the bass and the drums and me and Hooky just started playing a riff and we just recorded it and we got ‘Candidate’ out of that. We finished off ‘New Dawn Fades’ in the studio because Ian kept changing the lyrics to it so we never really knew what it was going to end up like. I think some of the lyrics he had earlier on were better; but nobody’s heard them so we’ll never know! I really liked the lyrics on ‘New Dawn Fades’. They were fantastic.

In that Unknown Pleasures era, in Debbie’s book and in the film, she’s obviously feeling she’s being shunted out of the story. What was going on at that time?

It was pretty simple really. Bands are a boys club really; it’s like joining the army. The big thing – you got a gig in Sheffield and it was like “Don’t bring the girlfriends, don’t bring the girlfriends” because one of the reasons that you got into a band included some sexual motives, let’s say, about it and Ian was the only one of us married and had commitments and the rest of us were young, and if not young, free and single, then we had aspirations to be young, free and single. And to fit in with the rest of us, you’d imagine him saying “No Debbie you can’t come – it’s the rest of them they don’t want you to come”. There was a lot of that went on. It was just because for everybody, when the wife turns up it’s like everyone’s on a bit of a downer now because you can’t get rat arsed and cop off with some bird.

And when Annik turned up what was the reaction then?

Annik turned up at a London gig and she was supposed to be some sort of journalist, so it was “Let’s cop off with the bird-journalist” and I think everybody had a go, but it was Ian who was most seduced by the romanticism of a Belgian accent! But it was weird because we’ve not really gone into Ian’s personality but he would act the way he thought you wanted him to act, and so with Annik he’d do things to please Annik and we just used to wind him up rotten about it. Annik was a vegetarian, and I always remember playing in Bristol, I think it was, and I said I’ll go and get something to eat, out to the kebab shop. And Ian isn’t having one; he’s a vegetarian. “You’re a vegetarian? How’s that happened? I’ll have your kebab then Ian. You’re a vegetarian? That’s news to us!”

When it comes to ‘Love Will Tear us Apart’, it all kind of got very specific didn’t it? How did the lads react to that situation?

You’re very selfish when you’re young, very, very selfish, and you just thought you’d be alright. I mean, we knew we had epilepsy, obviously, which is a pretty serious condition and we knew we had serious problems with his love triangle with Debbie and Annik, and also having Natalie…

You know, it was just getting worse and worse and I remember one time him ringing up and saying “I’m knocking it on the head. I’m just going to go and open a bookshop in Holland with Debbie and that’s it.” And I was like, fine, you know, if that’s what you want to do then good luck to you, that’s fine. And if he’d have done that, then Joy Division probably wouldn’t be anywhere today but Ian would still be alive I think. That’s selfish – you don’t really want to do that because the group’s great fun, it’s fantastic, you’re having the time of your life and you don’t want it stop. You don’t think that it’s going to end in tragedy really. You just think that it’s going to magically turn out alright; and that’s more naivety for you.

When you look back at the lyrics, it’s almost like that tragedy is almost written into the lyrics. Even from ‘Digital’ onwards, and so in a way that tragic act, the suicide, almost kind of validates the whole story.

You see, we always had discussions because I used to drive him home back to Macclesfield and although I said we didn’t talk about it, we did talk about life and things like that. Ian was very into sympathy – seeing someone else’s point of view – and that sort of thing; so I thought that’s really clever, how’s he writing these lyrics and they’re about somebody else. I never really thought it might be anything else. After he committed suicide we sat down and listened to then lyrics and it’s kind of; “How could we miss this?”. It sounds awful but that’s how it was – listening then, it was just like well, it’s a bit of a suicide note this isn’t it?

Can you remember the circumstances that you were in when you heard what had happened to Ian?

I’d been out for the day to West Park which is, strangely enough, between the hospital and the cemetery in Macclesfield, and I think I’d been there all afternoon in the park, and I went home and getting my things packed ready to go to the States, and Hooky rang us up and told me Ian had died, that he’d taken his life. And he was in the mortuary, about 100 yards away from where I’d been all afternoon. You’re angry. You just feel a whole load of emotions really. Anger that he couldn’t have, you know, carried on.

Anger at what? Yourself, him, the situation?

Yeah, at him, at you, because there must have been something that you could have done. You know because I’d seen him, I can’t remember, it was Friday night or Saturday sometime, I’d dropped him off at the Mexican on Oxford Road, and I’d said so “See you on Monday” and he was fine, absolutely fine. You know; “See you at the airport.” And then Hooky rings us up and that’s it.

He had tried to kill himself before. He’d taken an overdose and he’d gone and he stayed at Tony’s house up in Glossop, and then he’d stayed with Bernard, and we thought things were sorting themselves out somehow. But see, Ian would give you that impression; the northern thing about not showing your emotions to your mates and all that.

I think having epilepsy as well was you know, there was a bit of that. The treatment he was on; that’d bring anybody down because they were mind-numbing drugs that he was given, really heavy tranquillizers. Something disappeared; something just went when he was taking that medication. And the fact that the doctors had told him that he’d got to have a quiet life, can’t stay up late, regular hours, don’t get too excited; they were basically saying don’t be yourself. That was a big dilemma because the band was what he wanted. He wanted to do the band and then he found that like really he shouldn’t. So you’ve got a few dilemmas going on there.

And, also a few people have talked about his isolation. I mean, as somebody who went to see Joy Division, even the way that Ian was on stage he came across as a person in a world of their own. Do you know what I mean? That sense of isolation seems to have been part of his personality that people were touching from a distance and that you couldn’t get to him. So how can you help somebody like that?

Em, yeah that’s true; I mean he was, but everybody knew a different Ian really. Maybe Debbie knew him better than most because was there when we weren’t but he was, you’re right, he was something else and Ian was underneath that somewhere but you never actually, you never got that close to him.

The decision afterwards to carry on the band under the name New Order; Tony bless him talked about having a vision that the band, it would work and that it would be more legendary but was that part of your thinking?

No! We just liked what we were doing so much, and the thing was going somewhere; there was never any question of us not carrying on as a band. We just sat down and carried on and tried to think of a way to do it; just muddled through really. The one thing we knew we weren’t going to be when we carried on after Ian’s death was we weren’t going to be Joy Division mark 2. That’s a good place to start with what you’re not going to be; that we weren’t going get another singer who was going to sound a little bit like Ian and we weren’t going play Joy Division songs. We just slammed the door on it and that was kind of part of dealing with Ian’s death I think. That, yeah, we’re carrying on; and that’s just in a box over there, and, you know, we’ve got to do something else.

When it came to Movement there’s a little bit of the Joy Division sound, and I assume after Movement you decided, well we’ve got to take it on, and made a conscious decision to move into that more classic New Order sound.

What we took from Joy Division was the last two songs that we wrote as Joy Division – ‘In a Lonely Place’ and ‘Ceremony’ – and that was it really. When we did Movement, we hadn’t even decided who was going to sing. Hooky was singing some, Bernard was singing some. I think I’d managed to sing myself out of the job.

Gillian had a go on Movement didn’t she, she gets a few words in!

We did that when everybody else was on holiday and they came back shocked; “There’s a bird singing on our records! Martin?!”

It was a very awkward album to make but listen to it now and it’s not too bad at all. The thing was, Martin was weird on it, and now I can understand Martin’s weirdness; he was really, really, deeply affected by Ian’s suicide, but, again, this bloody, stupid northern tradition, he wouldn’t sit down and have a manly heart to heart, cry in front of us, and so he was just weird. I think his way of dealing with it was to take more drugs; which you know can solve a few problems but not in the long term. And so, we just thought Martin was being arsey more than usual, turning up and going and shutting himself in a cupboard, wouldn’t start working til midnight, and we just couldn’t understand what it was and we couldn’t carry on like that.

Just finally, you were talking about shutting the door on the Joy Division thing – obviously which is understandable – but then I remember seeing New Order in, I think it was in 1998 in the Apollo just before the Reading Festival, and as a New Order fan down the front for many years, there did seem to be a bit of a turning point that gig.

Yeah, what happened was New Order hadn’t done a great deal in the 90s and people had been asking “Do you ever think you’ll do New Order again?” and I said “No. I think that’s very, very unlikely.” Gillian and myself, decided that’s it we might as well start a family and we started a family and then blow me down if a few weeks later Rob rang up “Look. Someone’s offered us some gigs. We’ve got to have a meeting. Have you split up or what?”

So, we had a meeting. I haven’t seen them for years – years, quite literally – and we all went round to Rob’s office, upstairs at the Haçienda and that was it. You fancy doing a gig? Yeah right, OK; and that was it and we were back on it again. What we decided in 1998 was why the hell didn’t we play Joy Division songs? Because if anyone should play Joy Division songs surely it should be us. In a way you know, time heals old wounds and all that, but it was just felt alright and maybe Ian would like us to play the songs; so that was we did when we got back in 1998. We started incorporating a few Joy Division numbers into the repertoire.

It seemed quite an emotional evening for the band. I mean in the audience it was weird because you could see that, like you say, having not being together and the band back together and Bernard particularly seemed almost like he was feeling Ian’s presence on stage.

It was really emotional, cathartic gig that first one at the Apollo. Apart from the fact that it was a bit like playing in your mate’s large living room; we knew everyone who was there! It was good. It was good and yeah, it was good to do it. It was fine.

Ok, let’s leave it there. Thank you for your time Stephen.

Some of the incidents we talk about above later appear in Stephen’s book Record Play Pause: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist, published twelve years after this interview, and thoroughly recommended. And available here; https://www.psbooks.co.uk/record-play-pause-2

Further reading:

Joy Division ‘Closer’ – track by track

My forthcoming collection of interviews with musicians, artists, actors, writers…

New book announcement