The moment Joy Division made their live debut
In Manchester, madness is part of the everyday makeup of the city. The rain-drenched streets are a surrealist utopia that prove L.S. Lowry was a few maracas short of encapsulating the full shebang. So, it is perhaps no surprise that it proved the perfect breeding ground for punk and all the musical denominations that followed. Like many other bands from the era, Joy Division were born from one fateful night in 1976.
On February 21st of that year, a piece in NME written by Neil Spencer ran with the headline: “Don’t look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming.” Therein it documented tales of band members cavorting with half-dressed members of the public on stage, chairs and tables being utterly Chernobyled in a seeming mutiny against anything perceived as banal, and a Frenchman shouting to Steve Jones “you can’t play!” to which the guitarist flippantly replied, “So what?” With that punk was born in earnest.
In truth, the genre had already climbed out of the plashy depths of pop culture over in the US with the likes of Ramones, Television, Patti Smith and even proto-punk acts like The Stooges and New York Dolls. Manchester was almost destined to be receptive to this movement. At that point, labour strikes besieged the city, slum clearances made it look dystopian, factories closed their doors, and even the football teams were shit. The place was positively Victorian, in fact, it was as though the clocks had stopped shortly after the city’s booming era.
However, despite the degradation at the time, Manchester has always been a city with an eye for style. After all, the Victorian boom of the town was grounded in the textiles trade which influenced the fashion of the streets. Moreover, art travelling over from America often docked in the region, giving Manchester the first look. Thus, when punk came aground, there were enough misguided bohemians looking for answers in art to propagate it to the next level.
The Sex Pistols harnessed that fertile atmosphere and changed the world on June 4th 1976 at The Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester. It’s the gig that everyone wanted to be at, and everyone subsequently claims to have been there. According to David Nolan, author of I Swear, I Was There: The Gig That Changed The World, something seems to be amiss on this front: “It’s funny because I think you can get 150 people in the Lesser Free Trade Hall and by my reckoning seven and a half thousand were there supposedly so something must have gone awry with the ticketing, apparently!”
However, one man who certainly was in attendance was Peter Hook. The future Joy Division bassist was blown away. He told the Manchester Evening News, on the 40th anniversary of the gig, “It’s my 40th anniversary, too, because I walked out of that gig as a musician. I came home with a guitar and told my dad, ‘I’m a punk musician now’, and my father said, ‘You won’t last a week’. Here I am 40 years later.”
However, it didn’t always seem like he was fated to make it in the industry. Joy Division’s first incarnation were widely slated. They were initially known as Warsaw and they were heavily maligned in Manchester. Bernard Sumner was at the Sex Pistols show with Hook too, and he recalled that they “destroyed the myth of being a pop star, of a musician being some kind of god that you had to worship”—sadly, certain punk fans thought that Warsaw were taking that mantra to the extreme.
When discussing Warsaw in his memoir, John Cooper Clarke made an honest assertion about Joy Division’s early form. He writes: “Right back when I knew them as Warsaw, I’d seen something in them. Or should I say, I didn’t see anything different from the rest of the punk bands on the scene.”
Adding: “Warsaw were no worse or better than anybody else, so why they attracted so much animosity was a mystery to me. I mean, none of them could play very much, but as I’ve said, limited technical proficiency was one of punk rock’s strengths, and a large part of its charm.”
That wasn’t their only problem either. They were also constantly being confused for the London punk band Warsaw Pakt. In more bad news, the band grew so disillusioned with their drummer, Steve Brotherdale of punk outfit The Panik, that one day on the way home from the studio, they asked him to get out of the car to check on a flat tire, as he inspected the perfectly intact rear wheels, they sped off and left him. Soon after, they were looking for a new sticksmith.
When Ian Curtis’ old school friend Stephen Morris joined a month later in the summer of 1977, after being the only person to reply to an advert, the band seemed to be a “complete family”. So, with that in mind, they chose to roll this fresh impetus into a new outlet. They renamed themselves Joy Division and set about booking their first gig.
Their first outing as Joy Division was on January 25th, 1978. The line-up consisted of Curtis, Hook, Sumner and Morris. The show took place at Pips Disco on Fennel Street in Manchester. While their new Nazi sex-slave-derived name hinted at a more sombre affair, the fact that they were still billed as Warsaw in error by the Manchester Evening News promised that there would still be a hangover from the snarling side of punk. The band had not yet entered the post-punk stage in earnest.
Initial problems arose when the doorman refused entry to Curtis. It’s never promising to be barred from your own gig. When he pleaded the point that he was the lead singer of the band, the bouncer said, ‘I don’t care if you’re the Pope, you’re not getting in’. Eventually, the issue was resolved, and Curtis made it to the stage just before starting time. However, things grew even more frantic from there. Almost immediately as the band started to play, a fight broke out among the crowd.
The fight had been initiated by fans of the warm-up act The Stance who were seemingly deaf to the music and just out for a punch-up. A frustrated Hook jumped off the stage and joined the melee. Upon seeing this, the club’s manager tried to throw the band off stage. Nevertheless, they preserved, and enough order was restored for them to get through their fateful first set.
“Violence apart, there were one or two things of note about this gig,” Morris recalled. “It was the first and maybe only time we played Kraftwek’s Trans-Europe Express as intro music; and Bernard mentioned something about that bloke from Rafters, that DJ fella [Rob Gretton], who was going on about wanting to manage us.”
Aside from earning them some proper management, the gig also helped to shape their future identity. “We didn’t think we had an ‘image’,” Morris would write, “and we didn’t want one.” Finally, the penny dropped that they should distance themselves from the violence of the punk scene and push on into a progressive literary territory where anthems like ‘Day of the Lords’ could be appreciated without fisty-cuffs kicking off. With that, the band were shaped into the outfit we now know. In essence, their image was simply being themselves.
As John Peel would later explain, “Well, they weren’t initially, of course, all that gloomy, their early things,” but their fateful change proved massively influential. “I still get demo tapes from America and from Europe by bands which are quite clearly influenced by nothing as much as they’re influenced by Joy Division. You get a bit fed up with it, really,” he recalled. Now, that’s the mark of a band that had a seismic impact with their soaring, singular output. You can still hear them lingering in some of the best music about today, but from January 25th, 1978 onwards, one thing became perfectly clear: there might be a lot of bands who go on to sound like them, but there will never be another Joy Division.
Joy Division’s first live concert setlist:
- ‘Exercise One’
- ‘Leaders of Men’
- ‘Warsaw’
- ‘Failures’
- ‘Reaction’
- ‘Inside the Line’
- ‘Ice Age’
- ‘Day of the Lords’
- ‘Novelty’
