I've just seen this on the Factory mailing list.
It's a personal account of NOs first gig from Mark Bursa [that's his email a/c anyways] who only went along to catch ACR who were headlining & then suddenly.....
There are some quotes in this text from previous posts that Mark was responding to. Hope this is of interest to some, it certainly was to me & thought it might be worth sharing.
< I think, upon reading your version of the quote, that Mark Johnson did get it right. My recollection was incomplete and slightly wrong.<
Johnson's quote in full refers to "our mates couldn't make it" when what SBS said was "The Names couldn't make it". Johnson lifted the inaccurate quote from one of the very few reviews of the gig (from, IIRC, New Music News, the short-lived paper put out by NME staffers during an IPC strike).
So, you were there that night... wow, that must have been something special. Did you know the band were going to be on? How was the crowd's reaction? Care to share any thoughts/impressions?<
Unless you were well plugged in to Factory, you'd have had no idea that NO (or Joy Division!) were going to play. They weren't billed. I'd recently got hold of The Graveyard & the Ballroom and fell in love with it, and ACR had recently played the Factory all-dayer at Blackpool Stanley Park (my home town). So I decided to go and see them again.
The Beach Club was in a small two-floor club called Oozits in Manchester, round the back of the Arndale Centre. It took a bit of finding, and as I didn't know where it was, I got there early. Good move, as it turned out.
The Beach Club format was bands upstairs, and films downstairs. The film showing that night was Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which fitted the ambience well. However rather thandiving in to see the film, I thought I'd check out the venue area - I could hear a band upstairs - turned out to be the end of ACR's soundcheck.
And this is where my brain started working overtime. At one side of the stage, there was Donald Johnson at his small, funky drum kit. On the other side of the stage (such that it was - I don't think there actually was a stage at all, just an area of floor) sat a much larger, black kiut. All around were flight cases stencilled with the words JOY DIVISION. Sitting casually on an amp, there's Bernard. I knew from talking to Tony Wilson at the Blackpool event that JD were continuing. You don't suppose....
To this day I've never seen Metropolis all the way through. I just got myself a beer, and waited by the stage.
About half an hour later, with the club half full, we were off. The stage is small enough to mask the big hole in the middle of the band - There goes the famous Crawling Chaos quote, and we're off on a 20-minute trip through a new set of Unknown Pleasures...
Nerves were masked by decibels - vocals scarcely audible. I guess they played Dreams Never End - Hooky singing over his shoulder, back to the crowd throughout. Certainly they played Homage, the first of the new songs to be discarded. And I guess they played Truth, with Barney's Melodica and Steve at the drums, with slightly wayward reel-to-reel rather than a drum machine. Five songs at most (Ceremony? Mesh? Guess so - as there was something that sounded a lot like Warsaw)
By the end of the set, the room is heaving as people abandon the cinema - they were still coming in as NO departed the stage. "Youve just missed Joy Division.."
Rough and ready, and more than a little bit angry. But you knew it'd be OK. Six weeks later, they played Blackpool, with a great deal more poise. Heck, you could even hear the vocals...
ACR, by the way, were sublime. First time I'd heard Shack Up.
BTW, I'm still a bit pissed off that the Names didn't show ... never did get to see them ;-)
Mark
