Totally Wired by Simon Reynolds

Author:Simon Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593763947
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2018-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

STEVEN MORRIS

Joy Division, drummer/New Order, drum programmer

You grew up here, in Macclesfield? It doesn’t look like a heavy industrial town. It’s like a commuter town almost.

It is now. It used to be a mill town. It all went, over the years. Now there’s four or five clubs in Macclesfield and you can go and see bands. You could never do that back then - you had to go to the Free Trade Hall in Manchester.

What were you into before punk happened?

All sorts of shit. I was an avid consumer of vinyl through school. I used to frequently buy records because of the sleeves more than anything. I used to read ZigZag and buy the stuff they said you had to listen to: West Coast stuff, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Byrds. I was also very into Van Der Graaf Generator and Peter Hammill. Kraftwerk, I liked them. Krautrock in general.

Did the German groups influence your approach to playing drums? Yeah, they did. I could go on at length about Jaki Liebezeit being a great drummer. He played quite differently. But to be quite honest I never wanted to be a drummer. I wanted to be a guitarist. But there was a bunch of lads at school who were into The Stooges and Velvet Underground. The older guy had White Light White Heat with the original black cover. Which really impressed me, ’cos I had the white one. At school I remember my predecessors would all wear ex-RAF greatcoats. You had to have one of them, and you had to have plastic sleeves to put your albums in, and you’d be walking about with either Best of Cream or Deep Purple in Rock. And they all had long hair like Neil in The Young Ones.

Did you define yourself against them?

Against, really. ’Cos I thought it was shite. And even later, Led Zeppelin - bollocks. Anyway, this older guy used to go on about Iggy and The Stooges, and I thought he was making it up. Frank Zappa, yeah, but nobody’s called Iggy - don’t be stupid. One place, strangely enough, I found that was really good at getting vinyl nobody else had was the record department at the Kendall Milne department store. I found The Stooges in there, the first album produced by John Cale. I put it on and it was so incredibly loud. And I thought, ‘Right, this is what we want to do.’ So we got a band together and we wanted to be everything that punk turned out to be. We just wanted to make a load of noise. This is yonks before Warsaw. Anyway, that’s how I got into playing drums. I wanted to play guitar, but they had too many guitarists already, so I had to play drums. So I wanted to play drums like the guy out of Can.

So as you developed your style were there things you consciously avoided doing?

When I got into drumming, my school of drumming was, ‘Buy a lot of drums and try and hit them all,’ like Keith Moon used to do.

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