The Blondie gig that secured Joy Division a drummer
You can’t have a good band without a great drummer, which was something of a problem for the punk rock scene, in which musical skill was often seen as superfluous so long as you had the right look and attitude.
Nevertheless, the punk boom did allow some of the most revolutionary drummers of all time to emerge, including Joy Division’s Stephen Morris.
Morris was the final band member to join the ranks of Joy Division, then operating under the earlier (and less catchy) name of Warsaw. Originally, the band had centred around Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner, after the pair bore witness to the watershed moment in which the Sex Pistols performed at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester back in 1976. Ian Curtis was soon recruited as their frontman, but a good drummer proved much more elusive to find.
After all, everybody in that Sex Pistols audience wanted to be a Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, or Glen Matlock, whereas Paul Cook – like most rock drummers – spent the majority of the gig hidden behind his kit. Consequently, budding young punks weren’t queuing up to take up percussion, and with the ever-expanding music scene of Manchester and beyond, there was a rapidly worsening shortage of drummers in the area, particularly for good drummers.
For a young drummer like Stephen Morris, then, options of bands to join were aplenty. As he once recalled to GQ, in fact, “I was at a Blondie gig and picked up a fanzine. On the back page, there were ‘Drummer Wanted’ adverts for three bands: Warsaw, The Fall and V2. I became aware that there was a bit of a drummer shortage.”
By that point, Joy Division had already unsuccessfully cycled through three different drummers, none of whom seemed to gel with the novel approach of Curtis and the band. Seemingly, though, Morris was a perfect fit from the off. “When I rang up Ian, he told me Peter and Bernard were on holiday,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘They’re on holiday? It must be a pretty good band if they can afford to go on holiday.’”
“We had jobs,” Sumner was quick to correct. “The jobs financed the holiday, not the band.”
Nevertheless, that was enough to endear Morris towards the band, and after a brief audition, he was in. It wasn’t so much his musical skill that cemented his place in the band, as neither Hooky nor Sumner were particularly skilled at that time, either, but more so the fact that he was from Macclesfield and had a car, so he could give Ian Curtis lifts to band practice in Manchester.
As soon as the band went into the studio, though, and the weird and wonderful mind of Martin Hannett was able to mould Joy Division into the band of the future, Morris’ drumming formed the entire backbone of the group’s sound. Unknown Pleasures, as legendary an album as it is, would have been virtually unrecognisable were it not for Morris’ innovative, otherworldly playing style.
Music fans, particularly those inclined to the punk realm, already have a great deal to thank Debbie Harry and Blondie for, namely their extensive discography of new wave masterpieces, launching them from the sticky floors of CBGBs to the dizzying heights of pop stardom.
Seemingly, though, we also have the New York outfit to thank for alerting Stephen Morris to the open drumming vacancy in Joy Division. Who knows how different the musical landscape would have been had he chosen to have a night?
