28 February 1980

Joy Division play the Warehouse, Preston, supported by Section 25. Set list: “˜Incubation', “˜Wilderness', “˜Twenty Four Hours', “˜The Eternal', “˜Heart and Soul', “˜Shadowplay', “˜Transmission', “˜Disorder', “˜Warsaw', “˜Colony', “˜Interzone', “˜She's Lost Control'.

“We turned up on the day and everything that could go wrong went wrong. The PA was dreadful, our equipment was all over the place . . . Everything, actually, just went completely to shit. But for some reason we embraced it with humour, didn't alaways happen, and it ended up becoming quite funny. You know the way it goes sometimes: when the more something goes wrong the funnier it gets? Well, it was like that.

Years later Tony Wilson put out a bootleg of this gig because he loved it so much because you can hear everything going wrong. It was the beer pump ““ it kept cutting out the amps. Barney's guitar amp went. Then my amp went. Barney came over and tried to plug into my amp and I was going, “˜You're wasting your fucking time “˜cause my amp's gone as well.' Then the keyboards went off.

Rob was in the background screaming, “˜Play, you fuckers, play!' It's on the bootleg, him screaming at us. Occasionally one of us would go to the mic and say, “˜Oh, sorry about this; this has all gone wrong.' It just completely fell apart but the audience didn't seem to mind, particularly. There weren't that many of them there. There was a wonderful, glorious moment when some girl got up on stage while we were all busy trying to fix our equipment; we were all looking at her thinking, What's she doing? She just went up to the mic, grabbed hold of it and said, “˜The coach for Blackburn is leaving in five minutes.' That's on the bootleg as well.

We just couldn't get it back then; we'd just lost it, you know, lost the whole gig. Complete disaster. So anyway, afterwards in the dressing room there was a great atmosphere, with everyone laughing and joking, but the promoter came back and was fuming. He said we hadn't played and we could fuck off if we thought he was going to pay us. Then he stalked out of the dressing room. We weren't having that.

The dressing room doubled up as a food store and there was a freezer in there, so I kicked the lock off the freezer. Inside were about thirty frozen chickens that we took as wages. I remember Ian nabbed all these chickens to take home to Debbie ““ so I think he must still have been living at home with her then. He probably took them back as a peace offering: Sorry I've got another girl on the go, love. Here are some defrosting chickens.“

28 April 1980

The “˜Love Will Tear Us Apart' promo video is filmed at T. J. Davidson's, Manchester. Directed by Stuart Orme. The video would be first shown on Granada's Saturday-morning children's show, Fun Factory, on 26 June 1980, introduced by Manchester DJ Ray Teret, who said: “˜Joy Division isn't a female vocalist; it's a band.'

“That's Rob Gretton's hand you see pushing the door, and the “˜Ian C' you see scratched on to the door originally said either “˜Ian C is a bastard' or “˜Ian Curtis is a bastard' and was scratched there by a girl who Ian had, shall we say, “˜spurned' a while back, when we first started rehearsing there.“