This interview with Stephen Morris was conducted by Dave Haslam on 28th September 2007 at XFM Manchester's studios in Salford, just before the film 'Control' was released, and some of it was used in Dave's podcast 'Heart & Soul; Ian Curtis & the Making of 'Control' which is available to download; itunes.This interview appears here for the first time in a raw, unedited form. Students, journalists etc; please acknowledge the source (www.davehaslam.com) of any quotes taken from here.
Growing up in Macclesfield, were you 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 the film, and I think it's in a letter to Annik, 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.
And is it true that you met Ian outside Strangeways prison in order to do the audition?
No, 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 also I thought he'd have spiky hair and safety pins through his nose but he was a really nice chap. And he immediately re-introduced me to the evils of smoking and his Marlboro addiction was passed onto me. At that time he said, "Yeah, right ok, we'll have a rehearsal but the rest of the band are away on holiday. I'll give you a ring when they get back." So, a couple of weeks went by and he sorted out somewhere to do a rehearsal and we got to meet-up. So I went round, picked up Ian - borrowed my mum's Maxi - and I went "Where we meeting them?" "Strangeways" and I immediately start thinking; hang on, been on holiday, meeting them at Strangeways, doesn't sound good this. And Hooky pulled up in this Jag and I thought is he somebody's dad driving a Jag like that? Anyway, it was Hooky and then Bernard, 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!
Did you kind of get the feeling at the time that Ian was the leader of the group because it was weird because it was Hooky and Barney's group but I think it seems like Ian was taking some of the decision and so on. 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 if 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 who, I was at school in Audenshaw with a couple of them. 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. We also did other cover versions that never actually made it to the ears of the general public. We tried 'Riders on the Storm' by The Doors which was a complete disaster. It never got past the introduction; it got as far as "Riders on the..." and then it just fell to pieces. And we also bravely and I don't quite know why we tried - this might have been after, this might have been in New Order but it seem to remember someone starting to do a cover version of 'Seven and Seven Is' by Love and that ended up disgracefully. But those were two things we tried to do that never really worked. Actually when I come to think, it must have been much later. Those cover versions must have been New Order because at the start Peter and Bernard didn't know who The Doors were and when he wrote 'No Love Lost' which is, is it 'The Changeling' off 'LA Woman'? It's got a Doors riff, one of the tracks off 'La Woman' and they're going that's good, but we never said anything to them. Hooky and Bernard had no idea that it was a Doors riff until years later!
And 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 Pact" 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 Pact. 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. Were you expecting it? Was it kind of chosen for its controversy?
No. No. Completely the opposite because it was like I thought it was really good because we were identifying with the oppressed as opposed to the oppressors but it didn't go down too well with the Anti-Nazi League. Anything that was vaguely associated with World War 2 Germany was obviously, you know, out of 'The Hitler Diaries' and anybody who wanted to do anything like that was clearly of a Fascist bent and would be invading Poland at the next available opportunity. So, no it didn't go down too well but fuck 'em!
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 pretentions 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.
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