Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t
know
him.’
    ‘Well go over and say hello to him anyway. That’ll make him ashamed and he’ll stop.’
    To be honest they’d settled down a bit by then but Mrs Merton was still mithering on at me, so in the end we both went over and I said, ‘Hello, George.’
    He turned round, so drunk he was swaying on his feet and trying to focus, and he slurred, ‘Yeah?’
    I said, ‘My name’s Peter Hook from New Order. We did the theme music to
Best & Marsh
– you know, the programme on Granada.’
    And he went, ‘Yeah, I know,’ and turned away and blanked me. It wasso embarrassing. I just looked and felt like a complete twat. Then Mrs Merton started mouthing off and I had to drag her away. In the meantime they started messing about with this girl again. So in the end we rescued her, pulled her away, and these kids who were with George Best started getting a bit uppity: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
    I was like, ‘Fuck off, mate. She’s pissed; she needs to go home. She shouldn’t be here.’
    George Best was completely oblivious to all this. Never meet your heroes.
    So anyway, it’s a small world. I got George Best’s job at the Manchester Ship Canal Company, then later I joined a band and ended up wanting to chin him. But back then I was pleased as punch to have got his job.
    I was still living in Ordsall and could walk to work. They soon moved the department to the Dock Office on Trafford Road, which was even nearer, so for about a year everything was great. Like I’ve already said, though, the council was redeveloping and they started to knock down all the houses in Ordsall, wanting to move everyone out to a new development called Ellor Street, near the Precinct in Salford.
    All my friends moved to Ellor Street, which was all high-rise seventies flats and a new shopping precinct all built out of concrete. It was fucking rotten, horrible, like a concrete wasteland. And this was when it first opened.
    So, my mother, God rest her soul, wouldn’t move there. Me and our kid were gutted because all of our mates had moved but she wouldn’t budge, not even when the bulldozers moved in and we were the pretty much the last house standing in Ordsall – just ours and an empty one either side to prop it up. They kept offering her places in Ellor Street to try to get rid of us, but she wouldn’t go into a flat. She wouldn’t have it. All the flats they showed her she said were shitholes. The whole of Ellor Street she said was a shithole. Mind you, she was right: it was a shithole. But all my mates lived in that shithole and I wanted to live there too. I remember persuading her to at least have a look at one flat; we drove to see it but on the wall at the entrance to the flats there was sprayed the legend ‘Glasgow Rangers will die tonite!’ I don’t know if it was the bad spelling that most offended her but she made Bill turn straight round and she never went back.
    We lived like that for about six months, on our own like the weird family in a surreal film. The buses had stopped running – there was no traffic at all. To get anywhere we had to walk across a wasteland that had once been full of houses. Until at last my mum got an offer to relocate to another overspill area, Little Hulton. They’d offered her a three-bedroomed house in Brookhurst Lane with its own gardens, front and back,
and
an inside toilet. Didn’t have heating, mind, but otherwise it was fantastic and she took it on the spot.
    So we moved to Little Hulton, and all my mates were in Salford. Twenty miles, which seemed a long way at seventeen with no car. Nightmare. This was when I started spending a lot of time at Barney’s, because getting back to Little Hulton was so difficult. Most weekends I’d get the bus to his in Broughton on a Friday after work. Then we’d hang around in Pips or Man Alive in town, getting pissed and trying to chat up girls even though we were useless. We’d sober up all Saturday and go out again that night, to